


The Gunslinger Reborn

by Jormandugr



Series: Gone From The Window [1]
Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dark Tower But Like With More Women In It I Guess, Gen, Multi, NaNoWriMo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2019-08-16 15:55:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 62,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16498568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jormandugr/pseuds/Jormandugr
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and a war, and a girl at the window. In one world, one level of the Tower, the boy lived and the girl died. But not this world. In this world, Susan Delgado lived, and Roland Deschain died. And the world turned, and passed by, and moved on, and the girl left the window and took her lover's guns.Now the man in black flees across the desert, and the gunslinger follows.A full-length AU exploring a level of the Tower where Susan survived and took up the quest.





	1. The Desert

**I**

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. So it had been for years, and so it might be for years more.

The desert was vast and bone-dry, and the gunslinger’s tracks were gusted away as soon as her foot lifted; what was left was only an echo of her passing, the dust whispering out into the sullen, hot air. She neither walked nor ran, but loped on into the infinity of the desert, her face set, her grey eyes glimmering in the shadows of her broad-brimmed hat. She did not hurry, and she did not loiter: she followed, as she had followed for countless years, and when the dizziness and vastness of the white expanse before her began to drag at her heart and make her head spin, she went on following.

She was thirsty, but she did not drink, although the waterskin hanging at her belt was still half-full and although the leathery skin around her lips had begun to blister and peel at the relentless, dry heat. Water was precious, and the gunslinger had learned to last without it, as the Manni-folk did, as any creature left in so bleak and dry a place might. Water, like food and shelter and love, was a necessity become a luxury, to be set aside as long as possible. Only one thing mattered, and it was the trail.

Below her waterbag hung her guns, their heavy sandalwood grips carefully weighted to her hands, swinging in broad arcs against the washed-out denim of her jeans. They had swung there for years uncounted, and left their tracks on the cloth, where the holsters had worn the fabric thin and colourless over her bony, lanky thighs. Like the gunslinger herself, their age was hard to guess, but against the no-colour of her homespun shirt and her ancient, patched jeans and her long white hair, against the washed-out white of the alkaline desert and the hot white of the sky, both the guns and the gunslinger seemed to scream their vitality and their colour.

She crested a dune (such a dune as there was in this desert of hardpan stone and scouring dust) and saw the blackened remnants of a small fire on the leeward slope, where the shadows would soon begin to lengthen. Such spoor was her guide, and she smiled to see it, the cracked and creased planes of her face pulling back, her yellowing teeth bared. There was a ferocity to that smile, but it was a patient kind of ferocity, the kind that awaits its prey and will wait as long as it needs. She hunkered down in the dust on the slope, and ran the calloused tips of her fingers through the ash.

It was cold, as she knew it would be – and even so, she knew she was gaining. She could not have said how she knew it, but she knew it nonetheless, as if it were a smell on the air or a word left on the ground. She was gaining, and did he know it, too? She thought he must. Perhaps he longed for it, in his own queer way, or perhaps he feared it, or perhaps it was neither. It did not matter. What mattered was that these cold ashes, these ideographic signs laid in geometric burnings, were the spoor she followed, and they were drawing close to one another, the gunslinger and the man in black, and in time, this long hunt would be at an end.

Time was something that the gunslinger had no shortage of. She stood, and dusted the soot from her hands, and looked around the abandoned camp. No tracks; the wind was already scouring away her own, and his were long gone. No signs of life, besides the fire; no scat or spoor, no signs of discarded trash or of waterskins or cans; no marks of any shelter. It was always so, in all the long trail of such campfires she had followed southeast, and she knew it was always so, but she looked anyway. Finding nothing, she grunted and set down her gunna, pulling on the threadbare gloves tucked into her belt and rolling down the sleeves of her shirt. There was nothing to burn here but devil-grass, and she had no intention of handling it any more closely than she must.

She laid the beginnings of her fire away from his, although it would burn better in the leeward shelter of the stone where he had built it. It was a habit of hers, no longer conscious; she would no sooner burn her fire in his ashes than she would eat his shit. Instead, the gunslinger’s fire was set at a distance of a few yards, and built small and close in the meagre shadows that were beginning to lengthen. She did not light it at once, but sat cross-legged and watched the southeast horizon, watched as the sun sank behind her in what was not quite the west, as the faint sketched outlines of the mountains in the far distance faded into shadow.

She did not expect to see his campfire, and she did not expect to see smoke rising from the white expanse, and she did not see either, but she watched anyway, until the last of the light was gone and Old Mother began to shine overhead. Then, at last, the gunslinger allowed herself a pull from her waterskin, and struck a light to the carefully-laid pile of devil-grass, and began to settle for the night. She did not eat, and after that first mouthful, did not drink, but she rolled herself a cigarette and sat there cross-legged in the endless desert, watching the sky and thinking, once again, how vast it was. How endless, and how many years lay before her, and how many still ahead.

The smoke from her cigarette mingled with the dream-smoke from her campfire, that was said to bring nightmares and demons; tobacco and devil-grass both burned at their own slow pace, and their smoke and sparks meandered together into the night sky. The sky did not care that they burned, and it did not care that the gunslinger slept, and when the dream-smoke gusted downwards and made her turn and moan with the wind, it did not care then, either. It was as it had been uncounted nights before: the gunslinger, and the smoke, and the low groan of the wind in a desert that might never end.

 

* * *

 

**II**

Five days earlier, she had come down from the last of the foothills. The mule had still been alive then, though its staring eyes and rasping breaths had told her it didn’t have a great deal more travel left in it. She knew a pang at the thought, a queer kind of grief that hearkened back to the girl she had once been, lifetimes ago – a girl who would never have let a beast be driven so hard, or so far, or in such harsh terrain. She ought to have left it in the last town she had passed through, three weeks prior; it might have lived a longer life there, if not one of much more pleasure.

Since that town, there had been only the last dregs of human signs: little clusters of border-dwellers, lepers, and madmen; sod cottages with low roofs and their colour long washed out of them by the merciless sun. There had been a man who had leered at her as if he were looking through her to the oh-so-young-and-pretty woman she had left behind on the trail; another who had wept and gibbered at the sight of her; a third, naked and burned by the sun, who had pressed a silver compass on her and bade her give it to the Man Jesus. The compass was in her purse; she doubted she would meet the Man Jesus along her way, but doubted, too, that he would resent her so small a prize. She had even seen a taheen, a man with a raven’s head and a harsh cry, but it had fled at the sight of her, cawing something that might have been curses. Might have been anything, really.

It had been five days since she had seen the last of those, and she had begun to think that she had reached the end of the desert’s edges and of its few human traces, when she reached the peak of the last low hill and saw the sod roof, the crumbling walls, the man doubled over outside the little hut, hoeing a patch of corn with reckless, wild, abandon. The mule snorted and stumbled, and the man looked up. He was younger than the gunslinger had expected, with a shock of strawberry-blond hair falling almost to his waist, his bright blue eyes staring out like sparks from a weathered, bearded face. The gunslinger felt, for a moment, that she had seen those eyes before, and she almost stumbled at the thought, which was like a splash of cold water to the face.

The man watched her with interest but not surprise, and then, abruptly, he raised one hand in brief salute, then bent and began his weeding again. The gunslinger blinked, and then started down the hill, leading the mule with her, not hurrying, not lingering. She had seen eyes like those before, but not in that face, not in that man, and it mattered less than the reality of the border-dweller.

As she reached the edge of his little patch, she drew a pull from her waterskin to start the saliva flowing, and spat on the ground. “Life for your crop.”

“Life for your own,” the man replied, and straightened again, his back popping and cracking with the motion. His eyes were too bright, but they were sane, and his tone was amiable enough. “Long days and pleasant nights, stranger.”

“May you have twice the number.” Her voice crackled a little, as if from disuse. She didn’t smile.

He did. In fact, he laughed, a curt laugh that had little humour to it. “Unlikely,” he opined, and shook his head. The gunslinger could see him looking her up and down, but with none of the wonder or hate or mistrust she’d grown long accustomed to. He looked at her, she realised, as he would look at a man, and she liked him a little better for it. “I don’t have nobbut corn and beans. Corn comes free, but ye’ll have to kick something in for the beans. A man brings ‘em out once in a while. He don’t stay long.” And he laughed again, a crackling sound that, like his popping back, sounded too old for him. “Scared of the spirits. Scared of the bird-man, too.”

“I saw him.” She shrugged, looking back the way she had come. “The bird-man, that is. Ain’t much to be frightened of. He fled.”

“Yar, he lost his way. Says he’s looking for some place called Algul Siento, though sometimes he calls it Blue Haven – or Heaven, mayhap. I can’t make out which. Has thee heard of it?”

The gunslinger shook her head.

“Well… he don’t bite and he don’t bide, so fuck him. Is thee alive or dead?”

“Alive,” the gunslinger said, matter-of-factly, “last I checked. You speak like the Manni do. Theeing and thouing.” Not just like the Manni, but those others she once knew who spoke that way were long dead and best left so. In all the long life she had lived, she had learned to let some histories lie.

“I was with ‘em a while, but it was no life for me. Too chummy they were, and always looking for holes in the world.”

There seemed to be little the gunslinger could say to that, and so she didn’t. They regarded each other for a long moment in the harsh desert sunshine, the bent man with the shock of hair, and the tall woman with centuries written in the lines on her face.

“Brown is my name,” he said at last, and put out his hand. She shook it, and gave her own in return, and wondered at the simplicity of it. As they shook on it, and as she wondered, a raven cawed from the rooftop, snapping her back into the moment.

The dweller gestured vaguely at the bird as he loosed her hand. “And that’s Zoltan.”

The raven croaked again at the sound of its name, and launched itself into the air in a shambling froth of black feathers, coming to rest on Brown’s head, its talons tightening in his mat of red hair. “Screw you,” it cawed cheerily, from its new perch. “Screw you and the horse you rode in on.”

“I think it’s long screwed, thankee,” the gunslinger said, amiably enough, and glanced back at the mule. It stared back, bloodshot eye rolling, silently blaming. She felt, again, that pang of youthful shame, and looked away, back at the raven.

“Beans, beans, the musical fruit,” the raven recited, as if inspired by her attention. Its croaking voice sounded like half-hidden laughter, and its black eyes glinted sharply. “The more you eat, the more you toot.”

“Teach him that, did’ee?”

“That’s all he’d learn, I guess.” Brown shrugged. “Tried to teach him the Lord’s Prayer, once. Guess this ain’t Lord’s Prayer country.” His gaze wandered past her, to the featureless white horizon and the bleak shale of the foothills. He looked, for a moment, lost; dust scudded against his boot, and his bright blue eyes were shadowed, reflecting the too-broad sky. Then he pressed his lips together, and looked her up and down. “Those’re gunslinger’s guns thou’st carrying.”

“They’re mine.”

“You a gunslinger?”

“That’s right.” Her eyes burned into his, challenging him to pass comment. Brown looked back at her, placid and unshaken, and did not rise to the challenge.

“Thought your kind was gone,” he said instead, at last.

“Here I am,” she replied, and rocked back on her heels, tucked her thumbs into her gunbelt. “Guess you thought wrong.”

Brown huffed his resignation to the idea, without rancour and without wonder. “Come from In-World?”

“Long ago,” the gunslinger allowed, and glanced back the way she had come. This small talk didn’t suit her much, and she went to ask the question that had been burning at her, but Brown had seen that coming, too.

“After the other one, I guess?”

The gunslinger nodded, her face hard and featureless as stone. It saved time to be asked, in any case. The inevitable next question rose to her lips: “How long since he passed through?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, scratching his bearded jaw. “Time’s funny out here. Distance and direction too.”

“It’s so everywhere,” the gunslinger said, and did not relent. “How long?”

Again, the dweller shrugged, looking neither perturbed nor irritated by her impatience. “More than two weeks. Less than two months. Bean man’s been by twice since then. I’d say six weeks. That’s probably wrong.”

“The more you eat,” Zoltan mused from the man’s head, and fluttered over onto the gunslinger’s shoulder. She tensed a little at the feel of his talons digging through her shirt. “The more you eat, the more you toot.”

The gunslinger decided to ignore it, and did so. “He lay by here?”

“Stayed for supper. Same as you will, I’d guess. We passed the time.”

That brought a trembling kind of surprise, an eagerness, to her. She leaned in a little, the bird on her shoulder shifting and flapping to keep its balance. “What did he say to ’ee?”

“Not much. Did it ever rain and when did I come here and had I buried my wife. He asked if she was of the Manni-folk and I said yar, because it seemed he already knew. I did most of the talking, which ain’t usual.” He paused, and for the first time she thought she saw something of a wonder pass across his face – wonder crossed with a kind of almost-unconscious mislike, which was usual, doubtless, for those who’d met her quarry. “He’s a sorcerer, ain’t he?”

“Aye,” she said – not _yes_ but _aye_ , and for the first time saw a kind of surprise, too. “That and plenty else.”

“Are you?”

She might have laughed at it. Instead, she looked away, at the raven on her shoulder, and her grey eyes narrowed. “I’m no sorcerer. Just a woman.”

“A woman gunslinger.”

“Aye.”

Brown looked her up and down again, then shook his head. “You’ll never catch him.”

“I’ll catch him.”

She met his eyes, and they looked one at the other with a depth of feeling that surprised her – surprised them both, truth be told. There was no doubting her certainty, or the emotion that lay under it, like deep river currents under ice. There was no doubting the truth of it, either, not in the moment. She would catch him, she had said, and her tone and her carriage was such that there was no space for any other outcome.

Brown moved first, turning back towards his hut. “Spring’s under the eaves in back,” he advised, jerking a thumb in that direction. “You’ll want to fill your skins. I’ll start dinner.”

“Thankee-sai.” Manners had never been the gunslinger’s first priority, but it felt worth saying, now as ever. She said it to his retreating back, and watched him disappear into the hut before she began to move, stepping gingerly through the corn.

“Screw you,” the raven said, meditatively, and flapped off her shoulder as she walked, cocking its head curiously to one side. The gunslinger continued to ignore it, and pretended not to feel its eyes on her as she headed around the back of the hut. The spring was at the bottom of a hand-dug well, lined with stones to keep the powdery earth from caving. As she descended the ladder, the gunslinger thought that there was a kind of wonder to the work that had gone into this, at one man’s hands, the gathering and laying of stones that must have been years in the making. He had been certain of this, too. Certainty was the way such work was always born.

The water was clear but slow, and she watched reflectively as it sluggishly filled up her first skin, then her second. The well was deeper than she had first realised, fifteen feet at least - a good prison or ambush, and if the dweller had wanted her dead, he could have killed her in a moment with a stone from above. But she didn’t believe that he wanted her dead. She didn’t know what he did want, but it wasn’t that.

Zoltan croaked from above, and fluttered down to perch on the lid of the well, looking down at her as she finished filling the skins, corked them and slung them at her waist. “Screw you,” he cawed again, “and the horse you rode in on.”

“I told ‘ee, we’re already screwed,” the gunslinger said, quietly, and began to climb.

 

* * *

 

**III**

The hut was dug low into the desert, to hold the cool and shadows in; when she came inside, she had to clamber down a good three feet from the door. Brown looked up as she came in, then turned back to the fire, where water was boiling for the beans. “Found it well enough?”

“I’ll pay for the water,” she told him, and nodded, sitting down with her back against the rough stone of the wall. “Water and the beans.”

“Water’s a gift from God, as I think ‘ee well knows.” The dweller half-smiled, and did not look back at her. “Pappa Doc brings the beans.”

“I’ll pay it,” she repeated, stubbornly, and folded her arms across her skinny ribs, settling back. _There’ll be water if God wills it_ , they said, but she’d never much fancied that saying. Never much fancied trusting herself to any man’s will, or to God’s. “I ain’t one for gifts.”

Brown shrugged, and didn’t argue, turning back to his work. Soon, the smell of roasting corn was rising from the fire, and the gunslinger sighed quietly at it, closing her eyes. Hells, but she was tired. It had been a long way from Tull, eighteen- or twenty-hour days with little sleep, and gods knew how many of them. Most of them on foot, too, for there was no taxing that mule further than it had already been taxed. _The poor creature_ , she thought. Sympathy was dried up in the desert sun, but here in the shade she felt space to feel it, to let herself wonder at how hard she had become.

 _Tak-tak-tak_ , went the roof, and for a moment she thought it sounded like rain, then realised it was the bird, tapping its way across the roof. _Tak-tak-tak_ , again. It could have been rain, somewhere else, but not here. Here was a place that had caught itself in dry stasis, no rain, no green, only the dust and the wind. _Why would a bird stay_? she wondered. _Why would a man? Why would any thing that could leave live here, to harden and dry out and blow away with the dust?_

But it was an idle question, and it slipped out of her mind as the gunna slipped out of her hands, and the gunslinger drifted into sleep.

It was an hour or so later when Brown woke her, and the darkness was almost complete, the only light the dull glow of the embers. For a moment, in the dark and the smell of food, she thought she was somewhere else. She thought of green fields and a great canyon, and her father’s eyes smiling in his weather-beaten face – but that had been another life, and the green fields were a thousand miles behind her, and the eyes that met hers were not her father’s, but the dweller’s.

“Your mule’s passed on, tell ya sorry. And dinner’s ready.”

“Fuck,” she muttered, and pushed herself up to sitting, pushing back the brim of her hat where it had fallen low over her face. Again, dimly, she thought _poor creature_ , and wasn’t sure whether she meant the mule or the man, who was so casual in his passing comment. “Guess it’s no surprise. What happened?”

“Just laid over, that’s all. Looks like an old mule.” Then, with some apology in his tone, “Zoltan et the eyes.”

“As well if summat did, I guess.” The gunslinger sighed, and reflected on how long it would be, that endless desert, without even a mule. Well, it couldn’t be helped. Life serves you shit sometimes, her aunt would have said, and all you get to choose is how you eat it. “You’ll take the meat?”

“Be a fool not to.” Brown smiled at her, his teeth surprisingly white in the darkness, and gestured her to the blanket that served as a table. She sat cross-legged on the blanket, in front of the battered tin plate he’d laid out, and watched him. To her surprise, he didn’t serve the food at once, but paused to ask for blessings: for the crop, for health, for growth in the spirit. That last part started her. Her father had always prayed that way; for their spirits, and the spirits of their stock. Her mind turned, unbidden, to the mule, lying in the dust outside with ragged eye sockets staring. Another victim of the trail, of the hunt… of the gunslinger.

“Do you believe in an afterlife?” she asked, suddenly, as Brown served out roasted corn and boiled beans, which clattered like stones on the tin plate.

The dweller frowned, and for a moment, looked thoughtful. Then, slowly, he nodded. “I think this is it.”

 

* * *

 

**IV**

They ate in silence; the dweller meditatively, the gunslinger ravenously. She wolfed down the tough corn and the hard beans, washed down with five cups of water, and it was manna to her. All the while, she expected questions, as there were always questions, but nothing came. Brown just ate, and drank, and sat in placid silence, getting up only once, to answer the _rattatat_ sound like machine-gun fire at the door, and let the raven in. Then he settled back on the blanket, legs folded under him, and returned to his meal and the gentle, placid silence that stretched out between them.

The silence ought to have been welcome. Instead, it made her nervous. When the raven broke it with another cawing line of doggerel – _the more you eat! The more you eat!_ – the gunslinger jumped, and scorned herself for jumping. But she didn’t break the quiet between them, not until he was finished eating, and then only to offer tobacco.

Brown took the offer gladly, and the gunslinger settled back on her heels to roll her own cigarette. _Now_ , she thought _, now he’ll ask_. But he didn’t. He smoked in companionable quiet, staring into the dying embers of the fire, and his silence began to chafe on her, his _ease_ began to chafe. What kind of man was he, who let in an old woman with a dead civilisation’s weapons, a wanderer who’d come so far and so against what was expected of her sex, and had not even one question in him? Not even one doubt? He wasn’t a simpleton, there was no slowness to him, and yet…

Was he a man at all? The thought struck her like a stone, and she stared at the glowing tip of her smoke, her grey brows beetling together. Her quarry laid traps a-plenty along her way, and wouldn’t it be just like him, to set her to this silence, this comfortable silence that woke up everything she tried not to think on, and reminded her of ragged crow-pecked eyes staring blind at a desert sky.

“Lead us not into temptation!” Zoltan cawed suddenly, apocalyptically, cheerily. The gunslinger almost dropped her smoke, and that would have been a great shame, for tobacco was hard to come by in these days.

“If that bedamned bird hung about me so, I’d’ve eaten him by now,” she muttered, aggravated.

Brown just shrugged, waving a hand. “What talks is tough meat,” he said, with the air of one who is only saying what everyone knows. “Ravens, billy-bumblers, human beans…”

The gunslinger could only nod. But she watched the crow more closely, and she thought that she saw in its eye a glint brighter than the dimming embers. Then she blinked, and it was gone.

“Do’ee ken Tull?” she asked, raising her head. She would have liked to say she didn’t know why she was asking aloud, but the years had burned away some of her capacity for self-delusion. She knew, all right. Some words had to be spoken, no matter the cost.

“Tull?” The dweller tilted his head a little, looking comically like the raven perched by his knee. “Yar. Came through it to get here, went back once to sell some corn and drink a glass of whiskey.” He sucked on his teeth, and in the darkness, she saw him frown as if at some half-remembered dream. “It rained that year. Lasted nearly fifteen minutes. The ground just seemed to open and suck it up, and after it was just as white and dry as ever. But the corn – God, the corn. You could see it grow. Worse, you could _hear_ it, as if the rain had given it a mouth. It wasn’t a happy sound. Groaning and sighing its way out of the earth.” He paused, and took another drag. “I had extra, so I took it and sold it. Pappa Doc said he’d do it, but he would’ve cheated me, so I went.”

“What’d you make of it?” she asked, though from his tone she could guess. “Of the town?”

Again, he shrugged. “Not much,” he said, and in it she could hear that _not much_ meant hate.

She frowned, and tapped ash off her smoke into the hearth. Not much, indeed. “I nearly died there.”

“Say true?”

“Set your watch and warrant by it.” Another drag, the sharp, fragrant taste of the past. She pursed her lips, and sighed. “Killed a man they said was touched by God. Only ‘twasn’t God, of course. ‘Twas him.”

No question of who _he_ might be. There were only the two of them that mattered: the gunslinger, and the man in black. She thought, from the slow way he nodded, that Brown understood that. Maybe he’d understood it as soon as he saw her. Maybe he’d known before then.

“He laid you a trap.”

She nodded. “Aye. Aye, he did.”

That was his cue to ask questions, but no questions were forthcoming. It could drive a woman mad, she thought, this silent, placid acceptance. Maybe that was the point. Tull was burning inside her like a coal, waiting to be loosed, and he wouldn’t ask it of her, wouldn’t start her on her way.

She stood abruptly, her burned-down cigarette still clamped between her lips. “I need to piss,” she told him, rather sharper than she meant to.

“Do it in the corn.”

The gunslinger nodded. Halfway to the door, she turned back, glad of the dim light that made her expressions hard to read and harder to be sure of. “When I come back,” she said, more quietly, “there’s a story I’d tell. If you’d listen.”

“I’ll listen,” he agreed, and she thought that this was what it had been leading up to, all this evening. Whether he was a man or a mirage, a dweller or a trap left to snare her, this was always where it would end. She resigned herself to it, and climbed the steps out of the hovel, to squat in the powdery dirt of the cornfield.

As her urine spattered the hard ground and darkened the dust, she looked up at the indigo sky, at the moon glaring back down at her like one bright eye. Old Mother twinkled in the corner of her vision, watching, not caring. They were watching Tull, too, the gunslinger thought, but there were no eyes left to watch back. Only ragged, crow-eaten pits. Dead beasts, like the mule.

She straightened, tugging her jeans back up, and without thinking, made a sign from her childhood, one hand forked against the evil eye. It had been a long time since she did that, and as soon as she did, she felt stupid for it. But she felt better, too, as if something had fallen back into place.

The gunslinger turned, and left the night sky and the damp patch of earth and the mule’s black silhouette, and went back inside.

“Have you decided if I’m an enchantment yet?” Brown asked, amused.

The gunslinger laughed, a dry sound not unlike the raven’s cawing. “I’ve decided I don’t care.” Not wholly true, but not wholly a lie, either. She sat back down, and reached for her tobacco poke, proffering it. Detachedly, she thought she might have to kill him, once she’d told him. She might have to kill him anyway. He was young, and it would be a shame, but it was only one man.

As if reading her thoughts, the dweller looked up at her. The cinders lit his face strangely, made him look older and younger all at once. “I don’t want a thing from you, gunslinger, but to stay when you move on. I won’t beg for my life, and it’s not much of one, but I’d like to keep it.”

The gunslinger’s face softened imperceptibly, and she shook her head. “I didn’t offer naught but tobacco,” she told him, chidingly, and tried not to let her unease show. “What are you, Brown?”

“Just a man,” he said, in that same gentle tone. “Just a man, as you’re just a woman. And I’m here to listen, if you’re here to talk.”

“Have a smoke.” She proffered the poke again, but he shook his head. Shrugging, she took it back and began to roll herself another smoke. It helped. It gave her time to think, to begin to weave all that had happened into some kind of story, some kind of sense.

Brown watched, with his clear blue eyes, and said nothing until she was done. Then he struck a match on one yellow, horny thumbnail, and held the light out for her. “You were tellin’ me of Tull, I think. How is the place?”

“It’s dead,” said the gunslinger, and breathed deeply of the smoke, her eyes closing. “I killed it. Killed it for good, the moment I walked into that bar.” And she sighed, and reached for the words, and found them already waiting. "I bought the mule in Pricetown, and he was still fresh..."


	2. Tull

**I**

She had bought the mule in Pricetown, and it was still fresh three days later when she reached Tull. The sun had already set, but she rode on anyway, by the fading light of the evening sky, and by the moon – and then by the glow of the town, and the surprisingly clear honky-tonk piano playing _Hey, Jude_. Without realising, the gunslinger hummed along as she passed from one of the broad road’s tributaries, under the long-dead sparklights, and into the embrace of the little settlement.

It was a harsh embrace, and one without much gentleness. Like the prairie around it, Tull seemed at once expansive and shrunken in on itself, an echo of a whisper of past glories. The air was dry and, even now the sun was down, the heat lingered. It shrank at the scrubs and the timothy, made the whole place seem somehow weary, as if it had taken a breath and never yet found the time to let it out. The graveyard she passed on her way in was overgrown, tombstones leaning like teeth in a drunk’s smile, dust eddying at the locked gates. Even in death, it seemed, there was no relief from the oppressive weight of the air.

The desert was far off then, still in the distance, but Tull felt like its own kind of desert; not for want of water, but want of something far more fundamental. And still, as she rode down into the little bowl of a valley, towards the lights and the music, the gunslinger felt at home. That was worst of all.

There were few people on the streets. Three women passed by, like shadows, their white faces floating above high-necked, severe shirts and loose black slacks; their hair was pulled back into identically tight buns, and they looked away from her with pointed curiosity. A drunk lurched across the road in front of her, and laughed, high and cackling. In the tailor’s window, an old man lifted a lantern to look at her more closely, and muttered to his customer. The gunslinger was used to all of these, and said nothing, but tipped her hat politely and rode on down what, in a larger town, might be called the main street. She felt their eyes trace that old familiar pattern: to her guns, then her body, to her face, and then back to her guns with that unbelieving edge resharpened. What came of it then could be fear, or hate, or scorn. It could even be wonder. It all depended.

So long as it wasn’t immediate violence, she didn’t care – had learned not to care. She was what she was, and that was all. So she let them look, and let them mutter, and let the slack-jawed boy of about thirteen nudge and whisper to the girl beside him, and the gunslinger turned her back on all of them and went on riding. The lights here were working, although they weren’t true spark-lights any more; oil smudged the inside of the glass, speaking to the changes that had been worked on them. The gunslinger passed beneath their steady orange pools of light, until at last she reached the livery.

It was a poor sort of place, and if it weren’t on the coach road, she was sure it would have long ago gone under. As it was, the rail outside the barn was sagging and beginning to splinter, and the barn itself was in darkness, a faint glimmer of light inside speaking not to a candle or a lantern but to a hole in the roof, letting in the gaslight. In the yard by the barn, three boys hunched in a circle, playing marbles, their shadows long and dark and their eyes hollow. They were young, at that strange halfway place between child and adolescent, and they looked at her with naked hostility from over their cornshuck cigarettes. One boy had a scorpion’s tail tucked like a favour in the band of his hat. Another, touched by the sickness that had its roots woven through so many places, had a sightless left eye, that bulged out of its socket like guts from a slit stomach.

The gunslinger looked at them, and then looked away. Sliding off the mule’s back, she shouldered her gunna and started towards the barn. Inside, in the flickering half-light, an old man bent and straightened, tossing timothy hay with the stubborn ineptitude of a man who has done things this way all his life, and will brook no change.

The gunslinger whistled through her teeth, and pushed her hat back, raising her voice a little. “I’ve got a mule here.”

“Good for you, granny,” the hostler said, and pitched another fork of hay. He turned slowly, unhurried – as well he might be, she supposed, for it wasn’t as if she could take her business elsewhere – and she had the faint satisfaction of seeing his eyes widen and the smugness drop from his face as he took in the guns at her hips and the hardness in her face.

She let none of that show in her expression. Instead, she plucked out a gold piece and held it out, letting it glint in the light from the street. “You’ll rub him down and see him fed, you hear? I’ll ken if you don’t. And if you’ve space for it, he’ll have his own stall.” That last part was a joke, though her face never changed and there was no laughter in her tone. For all she could see, it might have been weeks since any of those stalls had had an animal in them.

The hostler came forward into the light, and if there had been hostility in the boys’ eyes, his burned with actual hate. Still, the gold called him as it might any man, and he snatched it out of her hand, biting down on it and examining the crescents his few teeth had left.

“Got no change for gold,” he grunted.

“Ain’t asking it.” The gunslinger met his eyes, and the hate in them, with a cool gaze; her hand shifted on the mule’s bridle as she drew it forwards.

“Whoever your man is,” he muttered, as he took the bridle and started back towards the barn, “you’re takin’ him for a fool. Hell of a price for a dried-out whore.”

“What was that?” Her voice was almost pleasant. It only made the chill beneath it clearer.

No doubt, the hostler thought he was a man not easily frightened; no doubt he thought he was well above being intimidated by any old woman past her prime. Even so, and without entirely understanding it, he blanched and lowered his head, hurrying back towards the barn and muttering under his breath. She watched him go, and shook her head.

“Rub him down, I said,” she called after him. “I expect to smell it on him.”

The hostler didn’t turn, and the gunslinger didn’t care. The point was made. She tucked her hands in her pockets, and meandered over to the three boys huddled nearby, who had watched this whole exchange with the kind of contemptuous fascination only ever summoned by teenaged boys. As she neared, she could all but see their hackles rise, like feral dogs approached too quickly. She’d seen boys like them in every town she’d ever been in, boys who might love but not when anyone was looking, and might not hate but would feign it in an instant if people were looking. Like feral dogs, they would bite if you let your hand too close, and like feral dogs, they would snap at your heels all your days if you weren’t careful.

“Hile,” she said to them, conversationally, and looked down at them, rocking back on her heels.

The three boys looked furtively at one another, watching for the signal, for who would speak first and how. She’d seen that before, too. It was a toss-up, if they’d speak to her with open hate or with the kind of gentle scorn reserved for women of a certain age. All depended whether they saw her as a doddering old woman, or a hag-witch.

Once, that thought had brought her some pain. Now, it was just part of the landscape of a new town, like watching the shadows and alleyways or like testing the mettle of its posse.

“You fellas from the town?” she tried, tiring quickly of their dumb silence.

The boys seemed unable to decide how to take her, and elected not to answer. One of them, the boy with the bulging eye spilling onto his pockmarked cheek, spun out a cat’s-eye marble into the centre of the circle. It hit the big croaker, knocking it out of the ring to bounce off a boot. The boy leaned in, picked up the cat’s-eye, and made to shoot again.

So it was like that, then. The gunslinger pursed her lips slightly, and shifted her weight a little onto one feet. “There a café in this town?”

One of them looked up, the youngest. A sore was oozing at the corner of his mouth, but his face was clear and both eyes seemed sharp enough, darting from her face to her guns with a look of unbelieving wonder. There was an innocence in that look, she thought, and one that might not last more than a moment in a place like this.

“Might get a burger at Sheb’s,” he ventured, after a moment, in an awed kind of speaking-to-grown-ups voice that she was sure wouldn’t last past his twelfth birthday. _He’d_ decided she was an old lady and not a hag, in any case, guns and all. That was something.

“Where the honky-tonk’s playing?” She followed the wave of his hand with her eyes, on down the street to where the lights clustered closer.

“Yar.” The boy nodded, glancing between his playmates, as if hoping for some sign – backup, or warning. They said nothing, but the gunslinger could see the smoulder of resentment under their hooded eyes. Whether they were angry at his kindness, or at his showing up their lack of it, she couldn’t say, but she thought he might regret it either way.

“Thankee-sai.” She tapped her throat to him, the way she would to a grown-up. It was the least she could do, really. “Good to know someone in this town’s got a tongue in their head.”

She turned away, started up the boardwalk towards the honky-tonk. She’d gone only a few steps before one of the other boys called out, a high, childish treble. “Lady-sai!” It was the third of them, the one with the scorpion’s tail bobbing in his hat. She looked back to see him on his feet, hands on his hips, halfway between curiosity and challenge.

“Ayuh?” she said, mildly.

“What _are_ you?”

It wasn’t the first time she’d been asked it, and doubtless it wouldn’t be the last. Still, she hesitated a moment before answering.

“Just a pilgrim,” she said, at last, and tipped her hat to him briefly, before turning back to the boardwalk. “Just a pilgrim passin’ through.”

 

**II**

When she came up to the lopsided batwing doors of the bar, _Hey Jude_ had petered out. After a few bars of disjointed pounding at the keys, another song started up, slow and maudlin, an old ballad she could almost put a name to, but not quite. Voices murmured out into the pooled kerosene light under the eaves, and looking inside, the gunslinger saw a sight she’d seen a thousand times before: the piano player hunched at the keyboard, the men at the card table playing a desultory game of Watch Me, the old bastards at the bar. A man with wild grey hair was slumped, blind drunk by the looks of him, on a table near the door. A girl no more than seventeen sat perched on the windowsill, skirt hitched to her knees, her arm around a man old enough to be her da. Just like every bar between here and the Clean Sea, the gunslinger thought, not without a wry twist of humour, and strode inside.

Silence fell all at once, like an anvil. The piano clonked out a couple more notes, and then died out; the men at the table laid down their cards and turned to watch _her_ instead. The whore on the windowsill laughed at something the man had said, shrill and high in the sudden silence, and then turned pink and fell hurriedly quiet.

The gunslinger’s bootheels clicked on the dirty floor, and she approached the barkeep, a woman with straw-gold hair and a dirty blue dress held at one shoulder by a safety-pin. Eyes followed her, curious and hostile, assessing.

“You got meat?” she asked, as if oblivious to their staring.

The woman behind the bar had no such pretence of obliviousness. Her eyes flicked from the gunslinger to her other customers, and she looked hunted, not knowing what to say or how to say it. The silence stretched out, every man waiting to take their cue from one another, all of them waiting to see what the barmaid would say and how.

“Sure,” she said at last, with an air of finality, of a decision made. She looked the gunslinger in the eye, and nodded. She had been pretty once, the gunslinger thought, but that had been some time ago. Now a scar puckered the skin over her eye and raised a corkscrew, hefty and ugly, across her forehead. She had powdered it, too heavily, and it only made the disfigurement stand out more. _You ought to let it lie_ , the gunslinger thought, _let it lie and let ugliness take you. It’s easier in the end._

Still, she thought she quite liked the barmaid, at first sight. There was a forthrightness to the younger woman’s tone, to the way she held herself, a hardness in her eyes that didn’t entirely cover her sorrow. The gunslinger’s heart, or what was left of it, went out to her a little; it was a hard lesson to learn, being no longer young and pretty, and one every woman must.

“It’s clean beef,” the barmaid said, quickly. “Threaded stock. It’ll come dear.”

 _Threaded, my ass_ , the gunslinger thought, and a smile twitched briefly at the corner of her mouth. The beef here had doubtless come from a cow with six legs and three eyes, if it had come from a cow at all, but what of it? She’d eaten plenty worse in her time.

“Three burgers, then, and a beer.”

The silence thickened, until it was louder than speaking. It had a different tone, though, now almost reverent. She wondered whether the people here had ever seen anyone eat three hamburgers at a go. Certainly, they wouldn’t have guessed it from an old woman as thin and dried-out as old jerky.

“That’ll go ye five bocks,” the barmaid said, and under her matter-of-fact tone was a hint of curiosity, even of greed – not for the money, but for what was behind it. For the _story_. The gunslinger knew that greed as well as anyone. She’d been a girl in a small town too, once, after all. “Ye ken bocks?”

“Aye. That’ll be with the beer too?” Without waiting for an answer, the gunslinger reached into her purse, and set a rough-milled gold coin on the bartop – and all of a sudden, the gunslinger herself was no longer the most interesting thing in the bar. She could actually _hear_ the other customers craning, following the glimmer and glint of the gold.

The barmaid looked at the gold, and at the gunslinger, and nodded. She disappeared into a small back room, and came back with meat on a paper, which she scraped out into three patties on the grill under the mirror. The smell rose quickly, maddeningly good, fat already beginning to crackle as it dripped onto the fire. The gunslinger stood, apparently unmoved, and watched.

The man with the knife was perhaps two steps behind the gunslinger when she moved. She had seen him approach in the mirror; not the knife at his belt, but the look in his eyes, and that was enough to know what he meant to do. She moved without thinking, one hand on her gun, the other flashing out to grab his wrist. Her eyes met his, grey to brown, and he found himself staring death in the eyes.

“Sit back down,” the gunslinger advised him, not raising her voice. The man opened his mouth, but all that came out was a low groan: the gunslinger’s hand tightened slowly and inexorably on his wrist, and something crunched audibly. Her other hand hovered over her hip, over the sandalwood grip of one of the big revolvers. Her face was hard. “Sit. Down.”

She loosed his wrist, and, apparently thinking better of several things in his life at once, the bald man scrambled back to his own table, cradling his arm against his chest as he went. His lip curled, showing his teeth, like a rabid dog, but he sat, and sat quietly. All the time, his eyes never left her. One of his companions looked at him, and then at her, and decided he had someplace better to be. The silence broke for a moment, in a wave of whispers, and then fell back more heavily than before.

The gunslinger turned back to the bar, and her hand moved away from her gun. Beer came in a cracked glass, left at a little distance, as one might leave an offering for a wild animal. The barmaid watched her with wary, fascinated eyes, worrying at her thumbnail as she did.

“Ain’t got change for gold.”

“Ain’t asking it,” the gunslinger said again, as she had said to the hostler, but with less sharpness.

The barmaid nodded. There was some anger in it, as if the display of wealth irritated her even when it was to her benefit, and some fear, which was no shock when the bald man was still pale and grasping his quickly-swelling wrist, but there was an admiration of sorts underneath, as well. In any case, she took the gold and pocketed it, and soon after the hamburgers came, pink around the edges and loosely-packed, grease oozing onto the cloudy plate they were served up on.

“You got salt?”

“Yar.” It came in a crock from under the bar, coarse grains the gunslinger would have to break apart with her fingers.

“And bread?”

“No bread.” The barmaid was lying. The gunslinger knew it, and knew why, and did not resent it. The whole bar’s attention was held by their little tableau now, and both women played their parts, in their own ways: the barmaid through care and caution, the gunslinger through stubborn blanking-out the stares.

She ate without tasting, methodical and steady, not hurrying but not pausing, either, as she shovelled forkful after forkful of grey-pink meat into her mouth. It wasn’t good meat, it wasn’t five dollars’ worth of meat, but it was meat nonetheless, and she wasn’t about to turn her nose up at it. The beer, too, was cloudy and warmer than it should have been, but beer was beer. So the gunslinger ate, and drank, and when she was finished, she settled back into her seat to roll a smoke, and it was then that a hand fell on her shoulder.

That was wrong. That was dangerous. She could have kicked herself for letting her guard down enough to let him come so close, for assuming that a single show of force would shield her for long. She turned, expecting to see the bald man - and saw instead the glazed, glaring eyes of the man who had been slumped on the table when she came in. The reek of devil-weed hung on him like fog, and out of that fog, teeth and eyes gleamed like will-o’-the-wisps. The teeth were green, green and mossy, and his breath was a miasma that made the gunslinger flinch. _Fuck me, he’s been_ chewing _it,_ she thought, in horrified wonder, and hot on the heels of that, _How is he alive?_

The answer was on her almost before the question, with a certainty not to be denied. _The man in black was here. The man in black did this._

They stared at each other, the gunslinger and the weed-eater, from across the edges of their own madnesses. She thought she ought to say something – as later, in the dweller’s hut, she would think she ought to say something – but the clarity of his insanity struck her dumb, as if her lips had been sewn shut.

He spoke, and to her wonder, she found herself addressed in the High Speech, which she had not heard since she was little more than a girl. “The gold for a favour, gunslinger-sai? Just one? For a pretty?”

 _Gunslinger-sai_ , he called her, and without ever even a question of it. And in the High Speech, which had never been hers, which was all that was left of her world. She thinned her lips, and found herself already reaching into her breast pocket. She pulled out another of the thick-milled gold coins, and numbly, without a word, held it out to him. _Now he’ll dance,_ she thought, from a great distance, _dance with it reflected in his eyes. Like a pink moon. He’ll dance like the witch-woman, and I’ll go mad, I’m sure I will_.

But although he danced, crooning and moaning in inarticulate pleasure as he turned the coin in front of him, the metal was gold and not pink, and she did not go mad. ( _Or perhaps_ , she might have told Brown, if she dared, _perhaps I crossed that river long ago_.) She watched him without blinking, watched him meander back to his table with the coin catching the firelight.

Around her, the bar emptied, the batwing doors flapping as the men of the town finally let atavistic fear overtake pride and curiosity. Last to go was the piano player, and the slam of his piano lid snatched the gunslinger out of her reverie. He loped out through the doors, and then he was a long flickering shadow, and then he was nothing.

“Sheb!” the barmaid yelled after him, and in her voice the gunslinger heard anger and fear and betrayal. “Sheb, you come back here, goddammit!”

“Sheb,” the gunslinger repeated to herself, rolling the name in her mouth, and shook her head. She knew that name. She had known a Sheb of old, before she was a pilgrim, before she was a gunslinger. But that was before, and she had closed the door to that time, let it fade to a long shadow and then to nothing. She pinched her lip between thumb and forefinger, and looked ahead, to the here and now and the weed-eater who now sat back at his table, spinning the coin in front of him as a child might spin a top.

He watched it turn. He picked it up, spun it, watched it turn again. By the third time, his eyelids drooped, and by the fourth, his head had fallen back onto the table. The gunslinger watched him with empty, stone-grey eyes, watching the claw of his filthy hand cupping over the glint of gold.

“You’ve driven out my trade.” The barmaid’s voice was low, furious. “There. Are you satisfied?”

The gunslinger looked up. “I’ve not been satisfied in many and many-a,” she said flatly, and shook her head. “They’ll be back.”

“Not tonight.”

The gunslinger shrugged. “Not so long as I’m here, mayhap. Still, they’ll be back.” She looked up into the younger woman’s burning eyes, and sighed. “I’ll not apologise. I brought none of this by choice.”

“You brought it, even so.” The woman put her hands on her hips, glaring down at the gunslinger with a startling equanimity fuelled by sheer rage. “And Nort, he talked to you funny. Never talked like that in his life before.”

The gunslinger sighed, and pushed herself to her feet. She was taller than the other woman, and held herself taller still by habit; tall as any man and taller than most. As if realising this, the barmaid took a tiny half-step back, but her hands stayed on her hips, her chin jutting defiantly.

“I don’t like to be held to what men do,” the gunslinger said softly. “I think you kennit, too. You and me are women, and all the world of women is bein’ held to what men do in our names. I’ve lived in the world to long to settle for it. So I’ll pay my part, and I’ll do no harm that’s not brought my way, but I won’t apologise.” She looked down at her own hands, bony and worn, like dry twigs under a desert sun, and she thought of the gleam of gold in the lamplight, and the greed in men’s eyes. No, she wouldn’t apologise. Not to this woman, not to herself. Not to God, either.

The barmaid looked up at her, and for a moment there was a silence between them, without that raw ache of hostility. Without liking, either; only with a cool, assessing kind of consideration. At last, she said quietly, accusingly, “What do you want?”

“I’m lookin’ for a man. You’d know him.”

Again, the silence. The look in the barmaid’s face had changed again; from speculation to a gleam that the gunslinger had seen before, that she had no words for. There was something slickly sick in that gleam, a want that would not be named and a fear and hatred of that want, and something more esoteric, a dark kind of hope.

The gunslinger waited.

At last, the other woman sighed, and sat down heavily, shaking her head. She looked weary, drawn too thin, like the watery sky when the sun has shone too long. The powdered scar stood out like a Reap-mark on her forehead. “I’ll close up,” she said slowly, reluctantly. “I’ll close up, and then I’ll tell ‘ee what you’d hear. Not here, though.” She looked at the gunslinger, and at the weed-eater still slumped unconscious on the table, and then she turned away, and in her face as she turned, the gunslinger saw a horrible resignation. “Go upstairs, sai. First door on your left’s my room.”

The gunslinger did as she was told; she turned to the stairs behind the bar, and left the woman to her work, and she didn’t thank her. Thanks would be out of place here, would suggest that it was a favour. That resignation in the woman’s face told another story; there was something burning under the skin, as there always was where the man in black had been, and some things had to be spoken.

 

**III**

The woman’s name was Alice, and when she was no longer behind the bar, she seemed smaller, though no less angry. She took the cigarette the gunslinger offered, and for a long time they sat silently in the small, dark room, lit by the glow of their smokes; Alice on the bed, one leg tucked under herself in an unconsciously girlish pose, and the gunslinger cross-legged under the window, her gunna beside her. The shadows were kind; they smoothed Alice’s scar, and they hid the creased and cracked wastes of the gunslinger’s face.

“Who are you?” Allie asked at last, into the quiet.

The gunslinger shook her head. “That ain’t the question.”

“ _What_ are you, then?”

“That ain’t the question, either.” The gunslinger took a drag of her cigarette, breathed out a long slow huff of smoke, and watched the light at the end of her smoke dim. As it faded, she relented a little. “Could be I’ll answer it, if it turns out to matter.”

The barmaid scrutinised her, the spark of her cigarette dancing in her lopsided eyes. At last, she nodded.

“His name was Nort,” she said, and tapped ash onto the floor. “He died.”

 

**IV**

Nort had been a drunk, and then he’d got a sniff of the devil-weed, and then he’d smoked it. Then he’d chewed it, and after a while all he’d done was chew it, chew the weed and sit in soiled overalls with a foolish grin, lost in the world of his own dreams while he starved and thirsted and rotted away from inside out. At last, he’d stumbled up to the bar, and puked – it had been black, Alice said, black and threaded through with blood and mossy green – and, without ceremony, pitched up on his face and left this world for the next.

It was the same day that the gunslinger’s quarry rode into town, on the back of a covered wagon, washed in on a wild dust-devil that scoured through Tull and saw every door shuttered. The man in black seemed untouched by it, riding through the whipping wind and grinning fit to burst. Old man Kennerly, the hostler, saw him through the window and resolved that he wasn’t at home should he knock; but the man in black did not stop, just rode on without slowing. The bay that pulled his cart was sleek and sharp-eyed, and its ears laid back flat against its head, its nostrils flared.

The man – who might have been a priest, for he wore a priest’s black robes, and who might have been a madman for that still-unwavering smile – pulled up outside Sheb’s, tethered the horse there, and moseyed inside with a saddlebag slung lightly over one shoulder. Alice saw him enter, and she might have been the only one, for though half of Tull was in the saloon that afternoon, they were all of them drunk as lords, slamming pint after gallon of drink down their throats and toasting to Nort, who was laid out like a chicken for plucking on one of the tables, his dead eyes staring blind at the ceiling and his hefty old boots standing in a strange kind of inverted V. Men hollered, danced, sang in cracked and off-tone voices. Sheb played his old piano in a kind of trance of ecstasy, full to the gills of drink and the joy of the still-alive, hectically banging out Methodist hymns ragtime, rocking in his seat like a man overcome in the power of God. In the corner, Zachary had thrown Amy Feldon’s skirts up over her head and was cackling to himself, painting Reap-charms on her knees. Kathy Feldon, her mother, was reeling against the piano and singing fit to bust in her cracked voice, as if she could drown out the storm all by herself.

The man in black passed through all this chaos untouched, and pushed back his hood as he came up to Alice at the bar. His eyes were a pale no-colour, all but luminous in the darkness. He wore no cross, or any other sign of any faith that she could see, and his face was pale and untouched by weathering. He was old-young, ageless and nameless and, when he spoke, there was no accent to his voice she could place. It was a pleasant voice, though, soft and warm, and it had no right to fill her as it did with both dread and lust.

“Whiskey,” he said, and Alice – who was plagued by her need for touch and love, who felt her own dryness all too keenly – clenched her thighs a little under the bar. “I want the good stuff, honey.”

She reached under the bar without looking, brought out the Star. She could have palmed him off with cheap rotgut, had done so to plenty of travellers before, but one look in those keen, luminous eyes told her that it would be a bad idea. She didn’t know why she should be afraid of him – he was a small man, compared to some in the bar, skinny and wiry – but she _was_ afraid, deeply and viscerally afraid.

He watched her pour, without blinking even when Sheb redoubled his playing and Aunt Mill started to shriek along about Christian Soldiers in her creaky, withered voice. That made Alice flinch, the warped sound shivering through her head like a spike, but the priest, if priest he was, just watched her pour with that endless grin.

“Hey, Allie!” someone hollered, and not without some relief, she hurried off to serve another and another, drew beer until the keg was dry and broached another, and let the hurly-burly of a busy night’s work catch her. It couldn’t take her mind all the way off him, though, the silent man at the end of the bar, with his black robe and his no-colour eyes and the endless, restless need he had reawoken in her. She could feel him still watching her, feel his eyes on her, and gods, but it felt that he could see right through her, right through to that fire in her belly and that shameful, endless need. She felt her face go hot, and turned away to make herself busy with the spigots, but still she could feel him watching her, and still she was sure he knew.

“It’s busy,” he said, when she returned. He hadn’t taken so much as a mouthful of his fine whiskey, just sat there rolling it between his hands, warming it.

“Wake.” She grunted it resentfully, and nodded at Nort’s body, across the bar. That was the other patch of silence, around Nort. There was a kind of unspoken distaste of his body, as there had been of him in life, as if his addiction might jump the gap from man to man.

“I noticed the departed,” the priest agreed, and nodded back, companionable, as if they had been friends for years – or lovers. That made her skin crawl, just as it made something clench low in her spine.

Suddenly, she hated everything – not just him, but _everything_. Hated her own body and her own self for betraying her to age and ugliness and lust; hated the close darkness of the bar with the wind howling unending outside; hated most of all the howling, cavorting customers and the plonking ragtime of Sheb’s godforsaken piano.

“They’re bums,” she said, with sudden fury, and surprised herself with the viciousness of it. “They’re all bums!”

“It excites them.” The man was unmoved. He tilted his head a little, eyes bright as a bird’s, watching her. “He’s dead, they’re not.”

“He was their butt when he was alive. It’s not fair he should be their butt when he’s dead, too. It’s…” She trailed off, unable to find a word for what it was. No word seemed to cover the banality of it, or the obscenity. She almost wanted, like a little girl throwing a tantrum, to scream _it’s not FAIR!_

“Weed-eater?”

“Yes!” And it _wasn’t_ fair, that was the thing. Her fury bubbled up stronger than ever, and she found her eyes were stinging with it. Poor Nort, to be dead. Poor her, to be alive. “What else did he have?” But despite the accusation in her tone, the man did not look away or drop his eyes, and she found she was embarrassed by her own outburst, embarrassed by everything, by the noise and the laughter and the anger and his eyes on her scar. She sighed, feeling the blood rush to her face again. “I’m sorry. Are you a priest? This must revolt you.”

“I’m not, and it doesn’t.” He knocked the whiskey back cleanly, all in one go, and settled the glass back on the bar. “Once more, please. Once more with feeling, as they say in the world next door.”

Allie had no idea what that meant, and didn’t care to ask. She just nodded, and tore her eyes away from him. “I’ll have to see the colour of your coin first. I’m sorry.”

The colour of his coin turned out to be silver: a big silver coin, thick at one edge, thin at another, pitted and milled. As she later would to the gunslinger, Allie said “Ain’t got change for that,” and as the gunslinger later would, the man in black waved it away. She poured again, and tried to make casual conversation, stilted by his clear gaze; asked where he’d come and where he was going.

He shook his head. “Don’t talk trivialities,” he said, and his tone was sharp but there was still that laughter underneath it. “You’re here with death.”

She recoiled - hurt, confused, angry. She felt _seen_ , and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling, not at all.

“You cared for him,” he said flatly, and his colourless eyes bored into her. “Isn’t that true?”

Allie laughed scornfully, to hide her hurt and amazement. “Who? Nort?” And her laugh petered out, her face hardening. “I think you’d better—”

He didn’t even seem to hear, just went on talking in that low, flat voice, went on seeing right through her. “You’re soft-hearted and a little afraid, and he was on the weed, looking out through Hell’s back door. And there he is, they’ve even slammed the door now, and you don’t think they’ll open it until it’s time for you to walk through, isn’t that so?”

“What are you,” she demanded, “drunk?”

“Mistah Norton, he _deid_ ,” the man in black intoned, with a sardonic twist, with a smile. “Dead as anyone. Dead as you or anyone.”

Alice recoiled again, and this time, she fumbled under the bar for the cosh she kept there. “Get out of my bar,” she said, and her voice trembled, but that was all right, because _she_ was trembling, her _soul_ was trembling, with fear and loathing and horror and, yes, with that fiendish want.

“It’s all right.” Soft again, almost kind. “It’s all right. Just wait.”

And she found her eyes drawn to his, to his eyes the washed-out colour of desert skies, and she saw that there was colour in them after all. They were blue. Blue, she thought, and felt something loosen in her, as if she’d been slipped a drug. Blue, she thought again, and felt herself fall unresisting into calm.

“Dead as anybody,” he said, again, and she found herself nodding. “Do you see?”

She saw. She saw, and she nodded, and the man in black laughed aloud – loud and clear and fine, sound enough to cut through the chaos and turn heads towards him. He whirled and faced the suddenly silent crowd. Sheb stopped rocking, struck a discord, and faltered quickly into silence; Aunt Mill’s shrill whistle of a voice died off as if she’d been slapped. Allie looked down, and found that her hands were at her belly, and they were shaking in the dead silence.

The man laughed again, a rich sound, a full sound, and a sound that killed all laughter in her and in everyone else. “I’ll show you a wonder!” he cried, and they watched him dumbly, without belief. He sprang from the bar towards them, his black robes ruffling like batwings, and Aunt Mill recoiled with a look of animal fear. But when he slapped her belly, she cackled, high and loud in the well-deep silence.

He threw back his head, and laughed once more, as if her laughter had sparked him off. “It’s better, isn’t it?”

Aunt Mill cackled again, her eyes wide and watering, and then she let out an inarticulate sob and fled for the door. Someone moaned low in their throat, wet and hoarse and inhuman. Outside, the wind howled and rose, and the storm began full force. The man in black stood over the table, and smiled down, wide and cheerful, at the weed-eater’s corpse.

“All _right_ ,” he declared, and clapped his hands. “All _right_ , let’s get down _to_ it!”

He began to spit into the dead man’s face. Allie watched in horrified silence, like all the rest of them, while under the bar her hands started to work in their horrid, instinctive dance. The man in black – no priest, never a priest – spat again and again, always with that grin; spat until Nort’s still face glimmered and dripped under the lamplight.

Some of the regulars fled. Some stayed. Sheb was the first to start spitting as well, hacking up great globs of phlegm, making the man in black clap him on the shoulder and grin still wider, laughing, spitting, and then others joined in, making a circle around Nort, showering him in spittle and phlegm, watering his face and his neck and the dewlaps of skin on his ragged, skeletal chest.

It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and there was only silence again, and furtive, ragged breathing. Then, without warning, the man in black jumped and jackknifed over the body, smooth as a fountain of water, and turned and did it again, flying over the corpse and catching himself on his hands, making an acrobatic twist and a turn, and flying again. On his third crossing, a twitch ran through the weed-eater’s body. And over he went again, and again, and now the man in black was heaving each breath, his head tilting back as he howled, and over again, faster, faster, and faster and faster worked Alice’s fingers under her skirt, and the silence hung heavier around him than ever, and Nort _breathed_.

Sheb screamed, a high scream like a hurt pig, and fled. Kathy followed a moment later, eyes wide, hands flung out, into the storm. Still the man in black danced, if it was a dance: over and over, faster and faster, like liquid darkness poured from cup to cup. Nort began to move, to jolt and jitter, cold fists and boots pounding on the table like the patter of rain, trembling and rapping and twitching. Over and over, and over again.

Nort’s eyes flew open.

Alice stumbled back against the mirror, and felt it crack with her weight. It shivered like a corpse on a table, and the crack was like thunder, and blind panic overtook her, and she bolted – bolted blindly for the stairs, while the man in black called after her.

“So here’s your wonder!” he called, panting. “I’ve given it to you! Now you can sleep easy – even that’s not irreversible! Although it’s so… goddamned… _funny_!” And his laughter faded and echoed in her ears as she scrambled up the stairs, slipping and stumbling, and shot home the bolt, and even then it echoed in her ears, even when it was silent and she was huddled there in the dark room upstairs.

She started to laugh herself, then, a mad giggle that turned into a keening moan, that was snatched up and wound in with the wind outside, as she rocked and moaned against the bolted door. What had she seen? What had _he_ seen? What was that thing downstairs, that Nort-thing that had jigged and rattled and knocked on the table like fists on a coffin? And if he was Nort, still Nort despite everything, _what had he seen_?

He was there when she came back downstairs at last. The man in black had left, rig and all, but Nort was there, sitting slumped by the door as if he’d never left. The smell of rot and decay that had billowed up from him when the man danced was gone now; the smell of weed still lingered, but less strongly than she might have expected.

“Hello, Allie,” he said, wary, tentative.

“Hello, Nort.” She lowered the length of wood she was brandishing like a club, but she didn’t turn her back to him as she went to light the lamps.

“I been touched by God,” he said, after a moment more. He didn’t sound happy about it. “I ain’t going to die no more. He said so. It was a promise.”

Her hands were shaking. “How nice for you, Nort.”

Nort just looked at her, doleful and doe-eyed, with a dreadful sort of vulnerability. “I’d like to stop chewin’ the grass,” he said. “I don’t enjoy it no more. Don’t seem right for a man touched by God to be chewin’ the weed.”

“Then why don’t you _stop_?” she demanded, in frustration, and suddenly found she wasn’t afraid of him any more. Not even a little. He was no monster, he was just a man, a broken man whose whole posture was hangdog and ashamed, whose eyes were haunted.

“I shake,” he said, simply. “And I want it. I can’t stop. Allie…” His lip was trembling. “You was always good to me. I can’t stop.” He was weeping openly now, fat tears rolling down his spittle-streaked cheeks. “I can’t even stop pissing myself. What am I? _What am I_?”

She had no answer for him.

 

**IV**

She trailed off there, and the gunslinger sat and watched her in silence for many moments, watched the glimmer of tears tracing unnoticed down Allie’s cheek. There was no judgement in that silence, but there was little gentleness, either. The gunslinger had trained herself out of the way of gentleness, and it was hard to fall back into – although it was true that she felt more than a pang of sympathy for the other woman, for what she had seen.

But the story wasn’t over. The gunslinger knew it, and Allie knew it, and they sat for a time in that knowing, before the gunslinger cleared her throat and began to roll another smoke.

“And then?”

Allie looked up, guilt flashing across her face. “He left me a note,” she said, quietly.

 

**V**

Nort brought the note a day later. “He left you this,” he said, and the hand with which he held out the folded paper was shaking. The smell of the devil-grass was thicker on him now, but still nothing like as heavy as it had been before. “I near forgot. If I’d forgot, he’d’a come back and killed me, sure.”

Paper was rare, valuable, and ought to have been treasured, but there was something heavy and greasy about this paper, and Allie almost pushed it away. Only, written on it, there was her name. _Her_ name, in scratched black handwriting. **Allie**.

“How’d he know my name?” she asked, but Nort only shook his head. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised. Sighing, she unfolded the thick paper and read it, slowly, not wanting to.

 **You want to know about Death. I left him a word. That word is NINETEEN**. (she read, and went on reading, her eyes dragged over the page as if on fishhooks, against her will) **If you say it to him his mind will be opened. He will tell you what lies beyond. He will tell you what he saw.**

**The word is NINETEEN.**

**Knowing will drive you mad.**

**But sooner or later you will ask. You won’t be able to help yourself.**

**Have a nice day! :)**

**Walter o’ Dim**

**P.S. The word is NINETEEN. You will try to forget but sooner or later it will come out of your mouth like vomit.**

**NINETEEN**

And, God, she knew that he was right. She could already feel the word pushing at her throat, trembling on her lips, trying to come out. Sooner or later, she would ask. And the gates of Death would be opened up for her.

 

**VI**

“It’s been stuck with me since,” she said, and took the second cigarette the gunslinger offered. She didn’t smoke it at once, though; she just held it in one trembling hand, watching the lit end jump. “I wrote it on the bar, once. More than once. I’m scared one day he’ll see it, and at the same time, I keep hopin’ one day he does.”

The gunslinger nodded understanding. She knew how it was to hold something dangerous close to you, to want to test it. She knew how it was for a word to be a loaded gun; knew that longing to put it to your temple. The mind ate itself, given half a chance, and all the strength and will in the world could only put off the inevitable.

It was a good trap. She had to give it to him. It was a good, solid trap.

“Now I’ve told you,” Allie said, surprising the gunslinger, who had almost forgotten she was still there, “what now? You’ll be leaving in the morning?”

“I should.” The gunslinger didn’t move, spoke around the cigarette still tucked between her lips. “You ain’t the only one he’ll have left a trap for.”

“Do you really think—”

“I think you should forget it,” the gunslinger interrupted, and her voice was low and sure. “Forget him. Forget what you saw. And for fuck’s sake, forget that word.”

“Will it really… do what he said?”

The gunslinger sighed, and got to her feet. “He’s lied about a thousand things. I don’t think this is one of them. He’ll tell the truth when it hurts more. Forget the word. And when you can’t forget it, you find somewhere on your own. Come up here, lock yourself in, scream it if you have to. Whisper it into the reeds. Wait for it to pass.”

“One day, it won’t pass.”

“One day, it won’t.” The gunslinger closed her eyes, remembering, her mind drawn back to the past like eyes to a page. “There can be a lot of days before that one.”

Allie sat where she was on the bed, and looked up at the old woman, wondering at her. “Are you leaving?”

“Do you want me to?”

Allie shook her head mutely. Another tear tracked down her cheek, dripped off the point of her chin. The gunslinger said nothing more, but unbuckled her gunbelt, laying it over the back of the chair, and toed off her boots, and lay down on the bed, the tip of her cigarette a soft orange glow in the darkness.

After a time, Allie lay down too, and found that though the gunslinger’s attitude was cold and gruff, her body was still warm. She drowsed, and listened to the slow rise and fall of the gunslinger’s breathing, and watched the glowing ends of their cigarettes brighten and dim, brighten and dim, casting strange shadows over the pitted landscape of the gunslinger’s face, making every crease and wrinkle into a deep, endless canyon.

They were of a kind, she thought, and found a sorrowful kind of joy in the thought. She and the gunslinger, they were of a kind. Luckless, scarred, hurt – and still surviving. Still here.

Allie stubbed out her cigarette and turned onto her side, breathing the gunslinger’s smoke-and-leather scent, and for the first time in a long time, she slept soundly.

 

**VII**

She woke with her hand on the gunslinger’s belly, and her face against the side of the gunslinger’s ribs. Early morning light spilled in through the window, and did nothing to soften the harsh, wind-eroded lines of the gunslinger’s face. The gunslinger herself was still asleep, or seemed to be; she lay on her back, arms behind her head, eyes closed, breathing steady, but when Allie moved to pull away, she moved too, accommodating it.

Allie stripped to wash unselfconsciously, her back to the sleeping gunslinger, and when she turned back and refastened the safety pin at her shoulder, she found the gunslinger sitting up, watching her.

“I’ll take breakfast, if you have it,” the gunslinger said, and swung her long legs off the side of the bed, and that was all.

Downstairs, Allie cooked grits and put them down in front of her, and the gunslinger ate them wordlessly, without commenting. Then, still sitting by the bar, still with that silent, contemplative air, she began to dig in her gunna, bringing out a balding hairbrush that looked as if it had seen better days. Better _generations_.

For an old woman, Allie thought in wonder as she watched, the gunslinger had incredible hair. It was steel-grey, bleaching to white, and brittle in places, but when the gunslinger unbraided it (with the air of one fulfilling a ritual) and began to brush it out, it fell past her waist, a cloak of silver - like something out of a fairytale, Allie thought, and watched spellbound as the gunslinger slowly drew the brush through her hair, over and over again, counting each stroke the way Allie herself had done as a little girl in front of the mirror.

“Do you have a map?” the gunslinger asked without looking up, and Allie blushed as she realised how long she had been staring.

“There’s not enough town for a map,” she said, and turned her face away so the gunslinger wouldn’t see the colour in her cheeks.

“Not of the town.” The gunslinger pulled the brush through her hair again, working out a tight tangle. “Southeast of here. What’s there?”

There was no reason to feel any claim on the woman, but Allie felt jealousy and grief spike in her. “The desert, that’s all. I thought you’d stay a little.”

“And on the other side of the desert?” It was as if she’d never said that last part at all, and in a way, she wished she hadn’t. In another way, it was like a slap in the face.

“How the hell would I know?” She could hear the shrillness in her own voice, and couldn’t shake it. “I’ve never been. No-one has. Nobody’s crossed it, and nobody tries.”

“He’s crossing it.” The gunslinger leaned back in her seat, and began to braid her hair again, still with that methodical calm, her eyes half-closed.

“And you’ll cross after him?” It came out as an accusation, almost a shout. She hated that, had always hated that bitterness that coiled inside her at times like these. That bitterness, she was sure, had grown since the man in black had passed through, like it fed on the shivers of fear he’d left. Fed on NINETEEN. Allie shivered, and tried to push that thought – that _word_ – back out of her mind.

Apparently oblivious to her turmoil, the gunslinger nodded. “I’ll cross.” Her hands moved fast, criss-crossing, weaving her hair into its long braid. There was something calming about watching it, about the practiced ritual of it all. Tying off the end with the same strip of rawhide she’d used before, the gunslinger wound her hair up under her hat and got to her feet. “The hostler’ll know, won’t he?”

“Kennerly?” Allie scoffed, wiping her hands on her apron. “Could be he knows. Could be he’ll spin you such a string of bullshit it could fertilise the whole desert.”

The gunslinger laughed at that. It wasn’t much of a laugh, barely more than a dry huff, but it was undoubtedly a laugh nonetheless, and Allie, who had a strong sense that the gunslinger didn’t laugh but once in a blue moon, felt warmed by it.

“Thankee-sai, Allie,” she said, and nodded, and left. Left Allie to stand at the sink and the water she’d been heating, and stare at the wall, and feel the hot tears blurring her vision. How long since anyone had thanked her? Really thanked her, and meant it? And when, she wondered, had it come to mean so much that someone did?

 

**VIII**

Kennerly spat on the ground when he saw the gunslinger approach, and hate sparked in his deepset eyes. He was a man with as few morals as teeth, but one thing he’d always been firm on, through two wives buried in the ground and God knew how many daughters, was this moral: that he was lord of his own home, and the devil take anyone who’d say otherwise. The gunslinger hadn’t said otherwise, not in words, but she hadn’t had to – she said it in the way she spoke down to him, the way she demanded, the way she had stalked into his stable with a swagger and those guns at her hips. She’d said it loud and clear, and now his one remaining moral warred with the other driving force in his life: his own survival.

Word had spread quickly of what had happened in Sheb’s the night before. He’d seen Zeke himself, seen the purpling swell of his broken wrist, and if he’d had any doubt before, he was sure now that the stranger’s confidence wasn’t just bravado. He was afraid of her, that was the truth, and that made him hate her more, hate her for showing his weaknesses and for making him feel small.

But her gold was as good as anyone’s – better, in fact – and he’d taken her custom, and the worst thing he could do, he was sure, was to turn on her now. So he spat and swore, but he met her halfway to the door nonetheless, and looked up at her with a mixture of hate and caution, like a feral animal kicked one too many times. He could feel her eyes on him, cool and hard, and was suddenly horribly aware of his daughters: the children peering from inside the barn, the baby crawling in the dust of the yard, and Soobie, the eldest, stolidly drawing water from the pump outside. They were watching her, watching him. What the fuck kind of crazy ideas would they get, with _her_ here?

Kennerly, who had never been a man of much resolve, resolved then and there to get rid of her as soon as possible. Right then, with the look on her face as she approached, the easiest way to do that seemed to be to play her part.

“Bein’ cared for, bein’ cared for, never ‘ee mind it,” he hastened to assure her, his hands up as if to ward her off, and then wheeled on an easier target for his ire. “Soobie! You get in!”

“You rubbed him down, like I said?” The gunslinger ignored his shouting, just as she ignored Soobie herself, who stood gawking by the pump, jaw slack.

“’Fore God, I did.” Kennerly actually crossed himself, as if to assure her, and a look passed his face that was either piety or constipation. “I’m a man of my word.” The gunslinger muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like _bullshit_ , but by then Kennerly was already turning to his daughter again, fist raised. “Soobie! You get the Hell inside, or I’ll have the skin off your back, swear it watch and warrant!”

“I don’t bite,” the gunslinger said, mildly, only now looking at the young woman.

Kennerly’s smile was a taut grimace, and in his eyes, the gunslinger read murder. That satisfied her, in a queer sort of way. She knew his kind too well - his daughter’s kind as well, with the self-conscious arrogance and the overt sensuality of a woman trying and failing to come into her own.

“It ain’t you,” he decided at last, which by the standards of such a man, was probably high diplomacy. “It’s her. She got a devil in her. She’s _wild_. Gets all sort of high-falutin’ ideas in her head, and, well…” He trailed off, in the face of the gunslinger’s stony expression, and tried to pick up his thread elsewhere. “She’s a slut, is what it is. I’ve tried to train it out of her-“ and again, that constipated look of saintliness – “but it’s as the preacher-woman says, you kennit? The End Times a-comin’, and children disobeyin’ their parents, and a plague on the multitudes. You kennit?” Still looking at her with that mix of cringing fear and burning hate, that she’d seen so many times before.

The gunslinger looked down at him, at this scrawny little bully of a man, who she was damned sure had never minded a girl being slutty when it was in his favour, and she felt nothing but cool pity. “I never disobeyed my parents,” she told him, without rancour, “and the world ended just the same. Who’s this preacher woman?” Then, shaking her head, “No. No, never mind it. You just tell me, sai, what’s out there?” She pointed southeast, where the main street turned and petered out.

Thunder lurked in Kennerly’s brows, and if looks could kill, the gunslinger’s long journey might have come to an end then and there. At the same time, he looked confused, off-balance, as if all her words and questions and changes of subject had battered him almost off his feet. There was something bleakly pathetic in the smallness of him, and the naked loathing in his eyes. Behind him, perhaps sensing the darkening of his mood, Soobie made a hurried exit into the little shack, dragging her bucket with her. She looked back at the gunslinger, and though the gunslinger didn’t make eye contact, she knew what she would see: that different, hopeless kind of hate.

“Dwellers,” Kennerly said at last, his voice almost neutral, if you ignored what shimmered under the surface. “Weed. Desert. Naught else.”

“And past the desert?”

He looked at her as though she were a fool. “You’d never make it across.”

“Didn’t ask if I’d make it.” Any satisfaction she’d taken in his anger was long gone. She was tired, and the day was hot, and all she wanted was for her questions to be answered straight, just once. “Who goes that way?”

“No-one sane.” There was mockery in his tone, and in his squint. He hesitated, and added with some reluctance, “Though he went that way. The fella who fixed up Norty when he was sick.”

“Dead, the way I heard it.”

Kennerly bristled. If there was one thing worse than being corrected by a woman, it was being corrected by a woman who didn’t know the town or what she was talking about. “You think I’m some kinda child? He was sick, is all. Real sick.”

The gunslinger shrugged, and let it go. Sick or dead, what did it matter? He’d never change his mind, not from what she said, only drive in deeper.

“So, say _he_ makes it across. What’d he find there? Does anyone know?”

Kennerly shrugged again, and his eyes slanted left, then right, as if he might find a way out of answering or out of standing here altogether. “My pap used to say coaches ran through it fifty years ago – some way, anyroad. Said it was mountains. Others say there’s an ocean, a great green ocean full of monsters. Then there’s people say it’s nothing. Just the end of the world, and nothing but lights that’ll drive a man mad and the smile of the Devil opening up to swallow ‘ee.” He’d said _man_ , but by the relish in his voice, it wasn’t men he was thinking of. By that relish, he was rethinking whether he might want her to make it that far. The gunslinger had no doubt that thought would give him pleasure – hell, he’d probably jerk off to it if he thought on it too long.

She looked him up and down again, saw the hate burning in him, and saw the fear. On balance, she thought the fear would win out – or maybe she just hoped it. In any case, she flipped another of the gold coins to him, and watched him catch it eagerly. “I’ll be stayin’ a little, I think,” she told him. “You look to my mule. Mark me well, I’ll be watchin’.”

“Watch all you like. I’ll keep my word.” He didn’t turn away until after she did, and only when she was starting back down the boardwalk did he turn and scramble back inside, shouting at Soobie to get her ass out and watch the kids, what did she think she was doing?

The gunslinger heard him yell, heard a blow land, and did not turn back. She felt some shame at it, but it was dim and dulled by the heat. Kennerly wasn’t her problem. Not yet.

 

**IX**

The day dragged on, as hot days do; the town was heavy with it, clogged with sweat and dust. The gunslinger sat in the corner of the bar, with her hat pulled down over her eyes, and dozed. Around mid-afternoon, Sheb sloped in, sat down at the piano, and started to play. The gunslinger watched him, and frowned, and said nothing.

And Allie watched the gunslinger. She didn’t like to admit to what the other woman made her feel. There was an anger there, at this stranger who had blown in with the dust and somehow caught her up in everything, but more than that, there was a comfort.

That night, Allie approached the gunslinger, shy as a teenaged girl and not a woman nearly at the change of life, not sure what she could say or even what she wanted. She lingered in the empty bar, while Sheb closed up his piano and packed away his things, and in her eyes, there was a need she had no name for.

She didn’t have to say anything, in the end. The gunslinger knew that look, and that need. There were no words between them, not in the bar and not when Allie trailed upstairs after the gunslinger, and not in the room where they lay. No words, but some noise.

“Who are you?” Allie asked again, when they were finished, between panting breaths. The gunslinger didn’t answer, but rolled over and closed her eyes, pulling the covers up over herself. Allie sat in the darkness a while longer, a new hurt twinging in her gut, worse than hate. In time, she slept.

The next night was much the same, and the day that followed. The gunslinger ate, and slept, and from time to time she wandered, looking out over the desert. Allie went about her work in a kind of haze, absent but, for a wonder, almost content. From time to time, they had sex.

And somehow, four days had gone by, and the gunslinger still lingered. She knew she ought to leave; with every day, the distance grew between her and her quarry, and the desert grew no easier to cross, the road no shorter. But she lingered nonetheless, without entirely knowing why, until she began to wonder whether the town itself might be the trap that he had laid for her. The town that felt somehow, unavoidably familiar.

She was sitting in the empty bar, nursing a beer, when she looked up and saw Sheb watching her, saw the absolute loathing in his face, and knew why – why the town felt familiar, why she had stayed, and what that nagging sense in the back of her mind had been. Seeing her looking, Sheb ducked his head and went back to hammering out a slightly off-key, overly loud rendition of _Constant Sorrow_ , turning all that fury in his gaze onto the keys.

The gunslinger finished her beer, slowly, without hurrying. She set the empty tankard back on the bartop, unfolded herself from her seat, and strolled over to the piano. He cringed away a little from her, as she leaned against the battered instrument and rested one elbow on it. His eyes flicked this way and that, as if trying to see his way out of the bar and away from her looming form, but that hate was still in them. If he had had a knife, she was sure, it would have been drawn by now.

“You’re off on the high notes,” she told him, evenly and amiably. “Like always.”

Sheb shot her a look of pure murder, and his playing slowed, then picked back up. “Got a request?” He didn’t call her any names, not out loud, but all sorts of them hung in the air outside of what was said.

The gunslinger shrugged one shoulder. “Do you?” Her pose, her voice, her manner all mild; only her eyes were flint. “Way you’re lookin’ at me, I figured you might have summat to say.”

His fingers slowed, stopped, clenched briefly into fists. The silence was deafening. The gunslinger waited, counted off ten seconds and then twenty, and at last, when he only sat there in dumb rage and fear, she turned to walk back to the bar, to call Allie for another drink.

“She was mine!” Sheb burst out aloud, almost as soon as her eyes were off him. The gunslinger slowed, but didn’t turn back. His voice was high and frantic, breaking with emotion. “What is it ye’re doin’ with her, you bitch? What is it ye’re doin’ to take her from me, take her so she won’t even look my way no more? She’s _mine!_ ” And he launched himself at the gunslinger’s back, a feral creature, bent and twisted up with rage, snarling and howling as he raised his fists.

The gunslinger turned then, and knocked him down almost absent-mindedly with a punch to his scrawny chest. Her eyes weren’t on his fists at all, but for the first time since she had ridden into town, they showed real emotion. Real _surprise_.

“You don’t know me,” she said, and she sounded _human_ , as she had not before. Sheb scrabbled up onto his elbows, and stared up at her in fear and confusion. The gunslinger reached out with one hand, fumbled a chair towards her, and sat down heavily. Her eyes were still on the little man sprawled on the ground, and there was no anger in them, just a distant kind of hurt. “Gods. Gods fuck me. You don’t know me.”

Sheb wetted his lips, making an abortive move as if to rise, and fell back down under the weight of her eyes. “I… Should I?”

She laughed then, a hoarse and humourless little sound that sounded like it could as easily have been a sob. “Should he?” she asked the empty bar, and her hand went to her throat, and she rubbed it slow and thoughtful, where a wattle of loose skin hung over her withered neck. “No, why would ‘ee remember? What I wonder is, Sheb McCurdy, would’ee have been so fierce for a girl you didn’t want to fuck? Would’ee have fought ‘em when they took me to the Reaptide fire?”

The pianist had made his footing, but at that, he almost lost it again. His mouth worked loosely, lips suddenly white. He held himself upright against the lid of his piano, and his knuckles were white, his fingertips trying to dig themselves into the scuffed wood. At the bar, Allie saw all this with her own eyes almost as wide as Sheb’s, and thought _God Almighty, he looks like I did. Like I did when I saw Nort breathe._

“…Sue?” His voice was only a whisper, really, dry and hoarse. He shook his head, disbelieving. “Not Sue.” And his eyes went to Allie for a moment, pleading, as if she could set him straight, as if she could set the world back on its right axis. There was a madness sparking there, waiting to burst to the surface. “Not little Sue Delgado.”

The gunslinger shook her head, and pressed her lips so tight they almost disappeared into her weathered brown face. And then there was a gun in her hand, and the click of the safety sounded loud as thunder to Allie’s ears.

“Don’t!” she burst out, and her paralysis breaking, she all but vaulted the bar to grab at Susan’s arm. It wasn’t wise, but it wasn’t anything to do with thinking, either: only with seeing the gun to Sheb’s head, stupid, useless Sheb who’d never done any harm to her or anyone, who’d kept her warm plenty of nights and been kind enough not to look at her scar when they made love. She grabbed the gunslinger’s arm, and it was like grabbing steel. “ _Don’t_!”

The gunslinger didn’t yield, didn’t look at Allie, and her aim didn’t even tremble. But, after a moment, she lowered the gun, and shook Allie’s now-limp grip off.

“It ain’t Delgado,” she said, and the emotion wasn’t gone from her voice, but it was deadened and crushed down, like diamond. She holstered the gun, and Sheb swayed faintly, his jeans darkening at the crotch. The gunslinger didn’t look at him, didn’t spare another glance for either of them. “Not any more. No more little Sue.”

Susan Deschain turned, and started for the doors, out into the lengthening shadows of the evening.

 

**X**

She walked without intent and without thought, down Main Street and out to the edges of town, then back the way she had come, up to the fields and the worn ruts of the coach road. She looked back down the road, as if looking hard enough into the gloom might draw out the shapes of the places that had once been hers: the ranch and the town and Gilead as was. Once she had been a girl. Once she had been in love. Once she had been just Susan, Miss Oh-So-Young-And-Pretty, still waiting and hoping at the window for a change to come.

But that had been decades back along the road, and she had left Oh-So-Young-And-Pretty behind with every step she took. The gunslinger looked up at the sky, at the moon hanging bloated and heavy against the void of the night, and she thought maybe she could leave Sheb behind, too, now. Sheb and all the rest of them, who watched and did nothing. There were more important players here, as there had been there. Sheb had only ever been part of the stage-dressing.

She went back to the bar, and slept in the room she was renting for the first time since arriving, and in the morning she walked out again. Allie served her coffee and grits, and made no eye contact, and said nothing. The gunslinger both resented that silence, and appreciated it.

That day was the Sabbath, or as close as ever came to it in a bedamned by-the-way shithole like Tull. The evening descended, a queer purple dusk that made Susan’s skin crawl with a half-remembered unease, and the gunslinger descended too, back down into the empty bar, where Allie was scrubbing ferociously at the tabletops with strong-smelling disinfectant.

“I don’t go,” she had said, when the gunslinger had asked her before; “The woman who preaches has poison religion.” That had been only a day ago, but she didn’t offer anything like that up now, or any of her drawing questions or hopeful looks. She just glanced up as the gunslinger passed through, and for all Susan was used to reading people, she couldn’t read that look. There was a pang there. She had liked Allie, and it stung to think that this might be the end of their closeness. But all closenesses ended, one way or another. Maybe it was better for it to go this way.

Susan slipped out into the heavy dusk, and to the leaning little shack of a church that stood by the graveyard. She stood in the vestibule, shrouded in the darkness, watching. The pews had been removed, and the congregation stood shoulder-to-shoulder, all of Tull packed into that rickety little chapel, singing hymns raggedly without accompaniment, but loud enough to rattle the roof. She saw Kennerly there and his daughters, and the bald man whose wrist she had broken, and, to her surprise, Sheb. It would be nice to think she’d scared religion into him, but she didn’t think that was it. No, it was down to the woman at the pulpit.

Sylvia Pittston, Allie had said her name was. She was a mountain of a woman, of the kind who seems to have been moulded rather than born: masses of white flesh overflowed the rough cloth of her dress, fat and muscle woven together into great slabs of arms and legs, all overtopped by a round face with eyes huge and dark as wells in the snow. Her hair was a rich chestnut colour, catching the light of the candles where it was piled on top of her head. She was beautiful, in a way that frightened rather than comforted; her beauty was encompassing and overwhelming, and like her huge arms, there was a sense that it might reach out to you at any time and crush you into it. Fervour burned in her like a Reaptide fire, and despite all of that, the gunslinger felt a kind of bewitchment watching her, felt that vast and aching emptiness behind the preacher’s huge brown eyes. Sylvia Pittston held the bible against her immense chest, in an ecstasy of faith, and as the congregation creaked and howled their way to the end of the hymn, she held up her heavy arms in benediction.

“My dear little brothers and sisters in Christ,” she said, and the silence fell on the congregation like lead. They craned, every one of them, to hear that sweet, clear contralto. “Brothers and sisters, the subject of our meditation tonight is _darkness_.”

A rustle went through the crowd, a kind of collective drawing of breath. The woman had a good grasp of showmanship, Susan had to give her that.

“Darkness,” Sylvia Pittston intoned again, “and those who bring it.” Her bosom heaved, and she clutched the book against herself again, all but trembling. “I feel, brothers and sisters, that I know almost everyone in the Good Book personally. In the last five years I’ve worn through three of ‘em, precious though books be in this ill world, and uncounted thousands before that. I love the story, and I love its players. Oh, I’ve walked through Eden with Adam, and seen its gates barred against us. I stood with David as he was tempted by Bathsheba at the pool, and with Ahaz when he gave in to weakness, let himself be drawn from the path of God. I slew two thousand with Samson when he swung the jawbone, and I wept for the head of John the Baptist, and, brothers and sisters, children of God, I have loved them, every one.

“But even they were tempted, brothers and sisters. Even they. And by who?”

She had them hooked. They hung on her every word, a kind of wave rushing through the congregation as they craned in to catch the sermon as it left her mouth. _By who?_ the silence seemed to ask, to demand. _By who_?

“There was the Interloper, children,” she told them, and it did seem as if they might be children, children listening to a story. “There was the darkness. There was the Lord High Satan, there was the Antichrist, the serpent on his belly. There was the Devil, waiting in the shadows.

“And beside him, there was the woman.

“Eve in the garden. Bathsheba and Delilah and Salome. And Jezebel, who stood on the balcony at Babylon and watched Ahaz fall, and laughed along with her master as the dogs lapped up his blood. Always she is there, waiting, watching. Ah, brothers and sisters, watch always for the darkness, and the Devil, and the Whore of Babylon!”

“Oh, Jesus--!” One of the men near the front, a tall man in a straw hat, fell to his knees and clasped his hands. “Jesus!”

“There’s a darkness in us all, brothers and sisters! A darkness and a madness, and to look in it would turn your stomach and drive you mad. But the Whore, she looks and she laughs at it, she dances in the ashes that it leaves!”

“Yes! Yes, oh Jesus!”

“She calls to men – oh, yes, and to women too, I’ve heard her siren call too, brothers and sisters! She calls us to his darkness, to that never-ending darkness!”

“ _Yes_!” It was a kind of collective exhale, almost an echo.

“She was there at the beginning, in Eve, whoring herself to the serpent!”

“ _Yes, God_!”

“There in Babylon and Egypt, there to rob Samson of his strength, there to burn the prophets of the Lord, to bring men to her bidding…”

The congregation were shaking now, and sobbing. Their hands were raised in praise, their eyes turned blank and unseeing towards the dark tin roof. Sylvia Pittston’s voice was thunder now, and yet still melodious, still clear. It seemed to shake the walls, as if the storm that was waiting outside had been drawn into her lungs and let out as this sermon.

“…And she will be there, brothers and sisters, she will be there at the End of Days! She will be there, at her lord’s right hand!” Her voice dropped again, like a wave that has spent its fury, like the pause before the next flash of lightning. “She will be the mother of the Antichrist, will bear that crimson king with red and bloody eyes, carry him forth in blood and wickedness, to bring on us that day when the Star Wormwood hangs in the sky, when all things end and all purity and goodness perishes from the earth…”

“ _Ah, Lord! Ah, God!_ ”

“She will bring forth monsters from her womb!” Sylvia Pittston thundered, and her eyes seemed to be on all the crowd at once, and hidden in the shadows of the vestibule, even there, the gunslinger felt those eyes on her. “And still you will want her, and still you may not know her, for she goes by a thousand names and a thousand faces, does Satan’s whore, just as he does, and follows at his heels like a whipped bitch, and she revels in your destruction, in all things of the flesh…

“What are her names, brothers and sisters?

“WHAT ARE HER NAMES?”

And the congregation called out names, called out _JEZEBEL_ and _DELILAH_ and _EVE_ , called _SALOME_ and _ATHALIA_ and _LILITH_. There were screams and moans and cries, and one woman stumbled forwards, fell, her shoe flying into the crowd. The gunslinger turned her back on them all, and ducked out of the shadows into the warmth of the evening. She had heard enough.

**XI**

The smell of the desert was stronger now. She could feel the push to move on, just as she could feel the push of the oncoming storm. But whatever work was to be done in Tull, it wasn’t finished yet.

First was Allie. She was still at the same work when the gunslinger returned, still scrubbing those stained old tables as if any lye and soap would make them new again. She looked up when the gunslinger came in, and opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again.

The gunslinger crossed over to the table by the empty fireplace, and sat down. “I’ll have a double whiskey,” she said, low and easy, “and I figure there’s some questions you’d ask me.”

“One or two,” Allie allowed, warily. She set down her cloth, wiping her hands on her apron, and went back behind the bar to pour out the Star. Two glasses. She set one down in front of the gunslinger, and still holding the other, sat down across from her. “You finally gonna tell me who you are, Susan?”

“I told you that first time I came in that door,” the gunslinger answered. “Just a traveller, passing through. Hunting him.”

Allie shook her head, and almost laughed. It was a hoarse, bitter sound, one of resignation more than anything. “So you ain’t tellin’ me shit, is what you’re sayin’.”

“I’m telling you the truth. Can’t ever tell more than that.” The gunslinger sighed, and sipped her whiskey. It burned on the way down, like it might be cleaning her out a little. “What happened with Sheb…”

“He’s done plenty in his time. Sure. Don’t surprise me,” said Allie, although it had. “Truth be told, whatever it was, strikes me it was bad. Bad enough to earn that.”

“What happened with Sheb,” the gunslinger repeated, still in that low even voice, “was all the past I want to catch up with me, and then some. I’ll tell ‘ee every part of my life, if you ask it. But it’s like that number, in its own way. It’d burn me, coming up, and I’m none too sure what would be left of either of us at the end.” Her eyes bored into Allie’s, and she set down her glass. “Will ‘ee ask?”

Allie met her eyes for some time, while the seconds ticked by and the purple sky outside darkened to black. At last, she looked away.

“You’re leavin’,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Aye.” The gunslinger took another draw of whiskey, and let it settle warm and sharp in her throat. “Most likely tomorrow.”

“Take me with you.” It sounded impulsive, but no less fervent for it.

The gunslinger shook her head. There was more she might have said – that Allie would die out there, that this path was one she’d always trodden alone, that she’d once begged a gunslinger to take her with him and see where it had gotten her – but she said none of it. She only shook her head, and that was that. Allie looked away again, sullen and angry, and threw back her own whiskey fast enough that it left her coughing.

The gunslinger waited for her to catch her breath, patient and unyielding.

“You’re a bitch, Sue,” Allie said bitterly, and got up sharply to fetch the bottle over. “A cold-hearted old bitch. That’s the truth.”

Implacable, unruffled, the gunslinger only shrugged.

“A cold-hearted bitch,” Allie repeated, and poured them both another drink. For some time, they drank in silence, by the unflinching orange light of the kerosene lamps. As she filled up the glasses for a third time, Allie looked up, and in her face, Susan saw the sweet and fierce girl she must once have been, before life and the town winnowed it away. “What’ll you do?”

“Tomorrow? I’ll go to the preacher-woman. There’s business still unfinished with her, though I don’t ken yet what. And then I’ll take my mule back, and I’ll head out to the desert, and if death don’t take me first, I’ll catch up to him in the end.”

“That ain’t what I mean, and you kennit well.”

Susan sighed, and looked down at her drink. “I’ll come up with thee,” she said at last. “Tonight. One last time. That’s what you’re asking, ain’t it?”

Allie smiled, and there was heartbreak in that smile. She nodded, and reached over the table between them, touched Susan’s bony, callused hand.

“Thankee,” she said, low and with meaning that Susan would only fully catch later. “Thankee-sai, Susan.”

They went up together, and while what they did could not be called making love, still it was something like it. Afterwards, they shared a cigarette, smoking it until it burned their fingers, and lay there naked under the heavy, thick air that heralds a storm.

The next morning, Susan woke before the sun was up, before Allie woke, and she pulled on her clothes and strapped on her guns, and went to see the preacher-woman.

 

**XII**

The sky was a sick, bloated purple-grey, and the air was sticky and still. A strange, flat light hung over everything, turned it into staging, like the painted curtains the mummers had hung when they rode around the towns, long ago, before the world had moved on.

Sylvia Pittston’s shack was behind the church, over a little knoll that hid it from the town. Susan settled her hat on her head, and looked back at the dark town still cast part in moonlight, and took a deep breath. It was the exhaling that was hard, when all the world around her seemed to go on holding its breath. When the storm hit, after a lull like this, it would be a big one.

The shack – which had belonged to another minister before Sylvia came out of the southeast, or so Allie had said; to the _real_ minister, she had said too, but they had both drunk a fair bit by then – the shack was small and in ill-repair, leaning worse than the church. It looked old and worn, all but the huge cross nailed to the front door, which still showed some paleness where the wood had been cut. There were no lights on inside. The sun was just beginning to rise, though the purple stormclouds hid it and made its light watery and faint.

Susan knocked, and waited. She had knocked and waited once before, outside a shack not unlike this: knocked and waited with her heart in her mouth for an old woman to dispense judgement. Well, that had been long ago, and now _she_ was the old woman, and wasn’t there a kind of justice in that?

She knocked again, twice, and then, when there was no reply, she kicked the door in. It was an easy enough thing to do: the hinges were rusted, the wood old, and the only wonder was that it took any force at all. There went the heel of her boot, splintering the wood; there the spring and clatter of a bolt breaking free and clattering across the floor; there the thud and crash as the door broke inwards, leaning at a drunken angle – _like the_ _stones in the cemetery_ , Susan thought drily, and did not wonder at it, either. It fitted, somehow.

And there was Sylvia Pittston, sitting in a huge ironwood rocker, a shawl on her shoulders and her huge, dark eyes glimmering in the stormlight. Rats, disturbed by the crash of the door, ran squealing and skittering across the floor to their dens, but Sylvia sat still as stone, except for the tiny motions of her rocking. The chair squeaked and squealed almost as loud as the rats.

They looked at one another, and knew one another. For a long, timeless moment, neither moved.

“You will never catch him,” the preacher said. “You walk in the way of evil.”

“Mayhap,” the gunslinger allowed, unhurt. “I’ve been told so before. Still, I’ll catch him.”

“Not him.” There was a fervour in the woman’s dark eyes, a wonder. “He walks in the way of the Lord.”

“Some lord, doubtless. That’s his way.” The gunslinger tilted her head, shook her head. “He fucked you, didn’t he?”

Still Sylvia Pittston smiled, broadly, beatifically. “He came to my bed,” she agreed, and in her clear preacher’s voice it became a benediction. “He spoke to me in the Tongue, in the High Speech. He laid hands upon me. He…”

“Fucked you,” the gunslinger repeated shortly. “In every sense. Why did he come?”

Only then did the preacher-woman react; only then did clear hate and anger cross her soft face. “You walk an evil way,” she repeated, in her turn. “All your life. You stand in shadow, just as you stood in the shadows in my church – and did you think I didn’t see you? Did you think I did not see your uncleanliness?”

“I just didn’t much care.” It was the truth, or most of it. “Why did he heal the weed-eater?”

“He’s an angel of God. He said so.”

The gunslinger laughed at that, not a croaking old-woman laugh now but something altogether fuller, if no less bitter. “Did he? And did he say it before or after he stuck his cock in you?”

Not just hate now, not just fear, but _offence_. She’d struck a nerve, the gunslinger thought, and took a grim satisfaction in it.

“He got me with child!” the preacher burst out, and now it was her turn to smile, a sharp and wild smile that pulled back her lips and showed her teeth. “With child! Not his, but the child of a great king! What will you say to _that_ , Jezebel?”

The gunslinger’s laughter was gone, as if it had never been. She stood, stock-still, in the doorway, and at last, her hands fell to the butts of her guns: those great sandalwood grips, carved with the _sigul_ of a house of kings. Of great kings.

Her voice came out flat and dead as the stormlight outside. “I can rid you of it.” Not a threat but a promise.

Sylvia recoiled, her hands on the vast landscape of her belly. “Come no closer, whore of Satan! You dare not touch the bride of God!”

“I dare,” Susan said, and stepped closer, drawing her gun. The weapon was cool to her hand. Her voice was still flat, but no longer dead. “A great king got me with child once. Did you ken that? What’s beyond the desert?”

Sylvia hissed and spat at her, and forked the sign of the evil eye. “You’ll never catch him! You’ll burn, burn like you should have! He told me so!”

“He got me with child,” the gunslinger said, and took another step, the barrel of her gun glinting in the ugly purple light. “I would have done anything for that child. And I would I had done this then.” The gun lifted, pressed against the preacher’s gut through the burlap of her dress. “What’s beyond the desert?”

“No!” Frantic now, transported like the congregation at her sermon, Sylvia Pittston thrashed and struck at the gunslinger, who batted her arms away as one might keep a child from some toy.

The gunslinger thumbed back the safety, and it cracked like thunder in the still air. “Answer me.”

Those huge dark eyes – wider now, wide enough that it seemed they would draw everything in on themselves – flickered to the gun, and up to the gunslinger’s face, and found no mercy in either. Tears, fat and heavy, trickled down the doughy white flesh of the woman’s face. Susan’s finger tightened, just an iota, against the trigger.

“ _Mountains_!” the preacher-woman howled, and scrabbled back as much as she could in the chair.

“What about them?”

“He stops on the other side! To make… to make his strength!” It wasn’t just fear. Susan could see something else, a horror beyond fear, growing in the other woman’s eyes. “Jesus, guide me! To make his strength! To make meditation! Let me go!”

“Not now or ever.” The gunslinger did not look away, would not let herself flinch. She would pull the trigger, if she had to. There were other ways to be rid of this, ways she knew or had heard – but this might be kinder. “There’s no prince inside you, woman. It’s a demon.”

“It’s the son of the King himself,” the preacher-woman said, and raised her head. “And you will be repaid, whore. You can be sure of it. Swear it on your watch and warrant.” There was a sort of defiance in her doughy face, even as the blood started to ooze slowly from between her legs. She lifted her chin, with tears in her eyes, and spat in Susan’s face.

The sound of the gunshot was louder than thunder.

 

**XIII**

She left the preacher’s shack, and for a moment stood leaning against the wall, catching her breath. The air was like a wet cloth pressing in, the heat like a hammer. Susan stood in the queer purple light, blood spattered up her sleeve and on her face, and looked down at the still-warm gun in her hand.

It wasn’t killing that was her trouble. She’d killed her first man when she was sixteen, and sometimes it felt like she hadn’t stopped since. No, not the killing, or the blood, or even the way the woman had screamed.

“It had to be done,” she told herself, and holstered the gun. Her eyes were dry as the desert ahead when she turned and started back into town.

Kennerly was waiting, or so it seemed to her, when she got to the stable. He looked at her with cringing hate, and she could see the wheels turning in his mind, see him marking the blood on her shirt and the look in her eyes. Wondering what had changed.

“Leavin’?” he greeted her, and did not try to hide his eagerness.

“Aye.”

“Before the storm?”

“Ahead of it, I hope.”

And there it was again, that look of smug hope, that I-know-something-you-don’t smirk hiding behind his fear. “Wind goes faster than any mule,” he said, and sucked on his one remaining tooth, speaking with some relish. “It’ll kill you. Whip the flesh right off your bones.”

“Then you’ll be rid of me, either way,” the gunslinger said amicably, and held out her hand. “I’ll take the mule now.”

“Sure.” But the old man didn’t move, but lingered as if he was waiting for something else, as if he might light on something else to say. His gaze flicked up, over her shoulder, just for an instant. In the glimmer of his eyes, the gunslinger saw the girl’s reflection, and sidestepped neatly as Soobie brought the heavy length of stovewood down where she had been standing a moment before. The blow grazed Susan’s elbow, making her jump; no more than that. Soobie stumbled, the force of the strike carrying her makeshift weapon out of her hands to clatter on the straw-scattered floor.

There was no malice in the girl’s face when Susan turned on her, only a kind of dumb incuriosity. One thumb slowly sought her mouth, and she met Susan’s eyes with a childlike guilt – like a little girl caught playing where she shouldn’t. Susan sighed, and rested her hand visibly on her gun, turning back to Kennerly.

He cringed, yellow-white with fear, eyes wide and red-rimmed. “I…” he managed, in a wet, hoarse drawl, and trailed off with a grin that might be intended as ingratiating. He looked to the gunslinger more childish even than his daughter, and at the same time horribly old and senile. It was impossible to be anything but pitying.

“The mule,” she said, and put her hand out again.

Kennerly scrambled away, all but weeping in relief. Susan sighed, and rubbed the bridge of her nose, moving to watch him go. It was barely halfway through the morning, and already this was turning out to be a long day.

He shuffled back, not meeting her eyes, all the fight gone out of him for now. The gunslinger took the bridle without a word, and turned away. On the way out, she paused, looking at the blonde girl with her thumb still firmly in her mouth.

“You get away from him,” she advised, and her tone was almost friendly. “You get away from all this shit. You hear?”

Solemnly, eyes wide, Soobie nodded – once, twice – and then the gunslinger turned her back and led the mule away. That was almost the last time Susan ever saw either of them.

 

**XIV**

The town was still as the boneyard she had passed through. Every window was shuttered, every lamp dark. The gunslinger passed alone down the empty street, watching the dust eddy up on the horizon, fogging the edges of the world. Soon. The storm would be on her soon.

Sheb’s was empty. She noted this with a detached, unsurprised kind of disappointment, and set about readying herself for the road ahead. There was corn meal in the back room, raw hamburger in the cooler: she took plenty of both, packed it neatly away in her bag, and left four gold pieces on the bar. Briefly, she thought of going upstairs, to say goodbye to Allie, and then she thought better of it. Her work in Tull was done, and every moment now was a moment better spent putting distance between her and this town.

Nothing moved but the gathering wind outside. The gunslinger took one last look around the saloon, and headed out into the half-light. That flatness still hung over everything, that oddly dead light that made the shadows too shallow and the whole world seem small and close. Strapping the bag to the mule’s saddle, the gunslinger took the bridle again, and put her back to the storm and the bar and the church, and started down the streets. It was possible, she thought, just possible, that she might leave town ahead of both the storm and the springing of her quarry’s trap. Possible, but not likely.

 _You will be repaid_ , she thought, and shook her head. No, until she was well shot of this town, she would be expecting it, waiting for the final sting.

It wasn’t a long wait. She was hardly halfway down the main street when the scream rang out behind her, ragged and wild and barely human, and the doors and the shutters flew open, and the fragile peace was shattered. Out they poured into the street around her, the men and women and children of Tull, in their rough homespun smocks and old jerkins and battered jeans, in their wild-eyed frenzy and their cold, black hate.

Her guns leapt to her hands, as if called there by some other force, and before she had even thought to move, she was turning, some deeper instinct taking her over, both guns raising. And there, in front of them all, there was Allie. Of course there was Allie. She was held firm, her face streaked with tears and her scar luridly purple in the storm’s light, and there was a different kind of madness in her eyes. Sheb’s face floated over her shoulder, like some demon moon; she was his shield, his sacrifice, his armour, and she looked at Susan with wide, pleading eyes.

“I said it!” she wailed, and there was a crack in her voice, the far edge of hysterical. “Kill me, Susan! Kill me! I said it, _nineteen_ , I said it, and he _told_ me… Kill me, I can’t bear it, Susan, k…!”

She was cut short there. Susan’s hands were well-trained to their work, and it was not the first time they had dealt death as a mercy. The bullet pierced Allie’s forehead, split that purplish scar and the skull under it; she jerked in Sheb’s arms, and sagged, and the last look on her face might have been relief.

No time to dwell on it. Sheb was next, the other gun sounding its atonal thunder, and down he went. Another shot, and another, and then they were on her, sticks and stones hailing against her, blows cracking against her arms and back. One man, the man with the straw hat, lunged with a kitchen knife: she blew him back in midair, two shots to the chest, and left him sprawling as if surprised, eyes wide and staring.

No time to dwell on it. Again the guns roared, blasting a way for her, and Susan lunged over the fallen bodies of two women and one man, and ran, firing as she ran. Down the boardwalk and back towards Sheb’s, where the honky-tonk would never play again. Up onto the step of the general store, where she turned and emptied her guns into the crowd, letting her hand and eye guide her shots with a speed her mind could never match. They shouted at her, screamed, and in its own way it was as ecstatic as it had been in the church: _JEZEBEL! WHORE! QUEEN OF DARKNESS!_

No time to dwell on it. The door was closed, slammed against the mob, and she backed into the general store, reloading as she went, her eyes never dropping to the guns she held as her fingers danced from gunbelt to chambers, a dance long written into her muscles. Three men burst through the plate glass door; three men fell like jerking puppets as she fired. Two more, behind them, twitching on the jagged remnants of the window, blocking the entrance. The weight of the crowd behind them made the whole front of the store seem to shake, the doorframe creaking. No time to dwell on it. There was never time, when it came down to it.

The gunslinger backed into the barber’s shop behind the store, and had almost made it through that door before the storefront gave way and they came roaring into the building, wielding hammers and knives and staves. There were children there, children young enough not to understand what it meant that their mothers and fathers were falling around them. She shot them anyway.

And over it all, now, she heard a voice she had never thought to hear again: Sylvia Pittston hollering her God and venom from somewhere nearby, urging them on. “YOUR SOULS TO THE REDEEMER! HERS TO THE DARK! MURDERER! DEVIL! WITCH!”

Susan could have laughed at being called a witch, if Susan had been listening. But there was nothing there for her to hear, except the cadence of it: words had no place now, not when her hands and her guns could speak for her. She emptied her guns again, kicked over a table with its bowl of boiling water, and her fingers did their dance, ignoring the heat of the guns and the casings, ignoring the sharp sting of the metal burning against her fingertips. A woman caught by the hot water stumbled back into the arms of a man young enough to be her son; he screamed and lunged, and fell back with two smoking holes in his chest as the guns crashed again. And then they were out of the barber’s, into the scrubland at the back of that thin veneer of civilisation, and the crabgrass snatched at her ankles as she strode back down off the porch. Four men rounded the corner, clearly thinking to catch her still inside; their grins and smirks died along with them. The fat woman Allie had called Aunt Mill came after them, her face contorted with hate, her hands clutched white-knuckled around an old pickaxe. A shot to the throat sent her flying with a startled yelp, and she sprawled there with her legs splayed and her hair still laughably neat.

Back into the desert: ten steps, then twenty, and in the few seconds of calm left, Susan reloaded again. She was still reloading when they boiled out onto the porch and into the desert like a great wave, like the stormclouds that roiled on the horizon. She saw Kennerly there, and the boy from his stable, the scorpion’s tail bobbing in his hat; saw Amy Feldon the whore from the bar, and the man who had been with her a couple of nights; saw Soobie too, still with that bovine dullness to her.

All of them dropped to her guns. Everything was down to the guns, now: just the guns and their targets, and all else was a blur and the rushing of blood in her ears. A knife, thrown with more luck than skill, grazed her arm and drew blood. She didn’t notice. No time to notice.

And then it was Sylvia Pittston coming towards her, one hand brandishing a cross, the other clasped to her belly, holding her guts in. There was no way she could be standing, but she stood nonetheless, and bellowed just as loud and as strong as she had from the pulpit, while crimson oozed from under her hand and pooled in her wake. She didn’t just stand, either, she _ran_ , charging the gunslinger with the wild strength of the condemned. “JEZEBEL!” she howled, “BRIDE OF SATAN! I CAST THEE OUT! I _CAST THEE OUT!_ ”

It took four shots to take her down. One to the knee, one to the chest, two to the head. She accordioned in on herself, and as her grip slackened, blood and offal slipped freely from the wound in her stomach.

They stopped and stared, for a precious second; again, the gunslinger took that second and danced through it, reloading, the casings burning neat circles into her callused fingers. She had thought they might break with the preacher gone, but there, unusually, she had given way to optimism; there was screaming and crying, but there was fury too, and new blows, a new anger behind their attacks. A stone struck her in the cheek, knocking her down, and then they were upon her in a great flow and rush, raining down blows, while she struggled against the spinning of her head and the sudden pain in her face. She threw one of them off her arm, kicked another in the gut. A knife bit into her arm, something like a fork stabbed her belly. Someone struck her over the back, someone else across the hip. A child of no more than eleven slashed at her leg, and dealt the only deep blow of the whole affair. All the time, her guns rent the air, until she lay in blood and brains and her own spent shells.

She made it to her feet as the last of them scattered and ran, and again she reloaded, mechanically and without thinking, and all that was clear was the fight. She was shooting at their backs now; taking their legs out from under them as they fled back for the town; leaving them splayed face-down as if in prayer. The last man, she took in the back of the head from forty paces, just as he made the porch of the barber’s shop.

And then it was over. The gunslinger stood, panting, on white alkaline soil turned pink with blood, and began to limp back the way she had come, counting as she went. They lay there like chaff, none of them peaceful in rest, none of them sleeping. Thirty-nine men, fourteen women, and five children. The silence in Tull was complete.

There was a heavy, sickly-sweet smell in the air. The wind gusted and rose for a moment, shifting dust against the still forms littering the street, and then fell again. Susan followed the wind and the smell, and outside Sheb’s, she looked up and saw Nort there, decaying and dead. He had been crucified against the rough plank roof, wooden pins driven through his hands and feet. His eyes and mouth were open, and imprinted on his forehead was a purple, cloven hoof.

The gunslinger doffed her hat, and stood there a moment, not surprised by it. Then she went to find her mule, which was amiably grazing a few hundred yards further down the road, untouched by all that had happened.

There was a stable, after all, and a bar for shelter, and tired and bleeding as she was, she wouldn’t get far that day. She put up the mule in one of Kennerly’s stalls, rubbed it down, saw to it that its trough was full and its stall clean. Then, against the rising wind, she turned back up the street to Sheb’s. Before there had been no time to dwell on it; now, perhaps, there was no need. She set herself to work, instead: bound up the cut in her thigh, climbed up onto the roof to let Nort’s desecrated body down onto the street with the others, then went inside to pour herself a whiskey and stitch up the new cuts and tears in her clothes. The storm raged outside, winnowing the streets, raking away the dust and the blood and the bodies. Dust and debris thundered against the windows of the bar. Inside, the gunslinger sat cross-legged in front of the fire, and doggedly patched her jeans, brushed out her hair, cleaned her guns. When she slept, in the bed she and Allie had shared, she slept soundly, without dreaming.

By mid-morning, the storm had passed, moved on into the desert towards the distant mountains. The gunslinger ate, and drank, and then she turned her back on the bones of Tull and moved on, too.


	3. The Dweller

**I**

The silence stretched out. The fire had died down to little more than a spark, and on the hearth, Zoltan had put his head under his wing. The dweller’s breathing was slow and easy, and she thought perhaps he had gone to sleep, too.

She was just thinking of getting up to spread her own pallet out in the corner when Brown spoke, low and calm. “There,” he said, “you’ve told it. Do you feel better now?”

The gunslinger half-smiled, tired and rueful. “Who said I felt bad?” Then, answering her own question, “Aye, I guess I do. Feel bad, and feel better.” She sighed, stretching out her long legs, which were starting to stiffen. “It was a good trap,” she admitted, after a moment more. “Saw it coming, and still ran right into it. Fuck, but the baby was a harsh touch.”

She’d wondered about that baby a lot, in the days and weeks since leaving Tull. She had no doubt that the pregnancy was real, or at least that Sylvia Pittston had believed it was real. Some things couldn’t be faked so easily, and the surety of a mother-to-be was one of them. But _why_ the baby? Had it just been a final laugh at her expense, one more twist of a knife from the man in black? Or had he meant something by it? _The son of the King_. Was there something deeper to what the woman had said, or was that, like the comment about burning, just another taunt he’d left to rile her?

She opened her mouth to ask Brown what he thought, and then thought better of it. Instead, reaching over to stir the embers of the fire into a slightly brighter glow, she reached for her pallet. “Who are you, Brown?”

The dweller shrugged, and got to his feet, shuffling towards his bed. “Just me, I guess.”

“Nothing more?”

“Nothing more,” he agreed. “No demon, no ghost, no trick. Just me, like you said.” He sat down on the low bed, and in the darkness, she couldn’t tell whether he was looking at her. “I think you’re getting close to your man. Is he desperate?”

“I don’t know,” Susan said, and thought again of the baby Sylvia Pittston had fought for. _Not his, but the child of a great king_.

“Are you?”

“I don’t know,” she repeated, quietly. “Truth be told, I don’t think it’s in me to be desperate any more. Seen it so long from the other side, I’ve forgotten how.” That struck her as oddly poetic, and utterly unlike her; the thought made a smile twitch briefly at her lips. She shook her head, and settled down on her pallet, sighing. After a moment, she corrected herself: “Not yet. I reckon there’s a way to go yet before I come back around to desperate.”

“That’s good, then,” Brown said, and rolled over and went to sleep.

 

**II**

In the morning, he fed her, and she checked her waterskins and her guns, and she made ready to leave. It surprised her to find that she wanted to stay. She liked Brown, his quiet calm and friendliness. He asked little and demanded less, and he had listened to her, and she had not realised until then how much she needed that story to be heard.

But the desert was still pulling her in, and the trail was warm and would not stay warm much longer. Slung around with all the mule had been carrying – water, shells, the last of her corn meal – she went to say goodbye to the dweller. In the full daylight, he was a wilder sight than ever: his shirt was off, his skin burned brown-red, and topped with that wild mane of red hair. The raven perched on his shoulder, preening.

“You’ll take the mule?”

He nodded. “I’ll eat it.”

The gunslinger nodded back, accepting it. It was a fair bargain, for his hospitality, and it saved her carrying it.

Brown put out his hand, and she shook it, surprised despite herself by the strength of his grip. He lived a thin sort of life out here on the borders, but death wasn’t coming for him any time yet, she thought. Not with that kind of strength still in him.

“Thankee-sai,” she said, and patted his arm. “For all of it.”

He shrugged easily, nodding off to the southeast. “Walk easy. Long days and pleasant nights to you.”

“And may you have twice the number.” She smiled, loosing his hand. “If you’d call that a blessing, out here.”

“Life’s a blessing anywhere,” he said, and bent to pick up his hoe. The last she saw of him as she turned and walked into the great expanse of the desert, he was bending over the sparse corn fields, digging with that same will and vigour, while Zoltan perched like a gargoyle on the little shack’s roof.

 

**III**

Her own fire was dying down now, and the stars were fading. The gunslinger twitched in her sleep, dreaming of deep wells and cool water, and of the stars reflected in them like eyes. In the distance, the mountains were a dark haze on the horizon.

She dreamed a pink dream, and woke up with the details already lost. It didn’t matter. Like regret and memory, dreams were easily burned away in this unrelenting desert. She was aware that, not so long ago, she had regretted Tull. She remembered regretting it, but it was only a ghost now, more a thought then a feeling.

There had been a time, she thought, when she would have found that unthinkable. She wondered, not without a twinge, what had happened to that time, and that girl.

But wondering did nothing to cross the miles, and the world had long moved on from Tull, from Gilead, from Mejis, and from little Sue.

Susan Deschain kicked out the remains of her fire, shouldered her gunna, and moved on with it.


	4. The Waystation

**I**

Her water had run out. The gunslinger went on walking, slower now, one foot before the other, and knew she was going to die. The knowledge did not surprise her, did not even hurt her. She had known she was going to die for a long time, now. And now it was almost upon her, that final entry to the land of Nineteen, she was almost relieved. It had been a long time coming.

Last night, she had dreamed of her father, sitting by the fire with his red thinking pipe and his thick black coffee. He had looked at her, and she had known the face of her father, but he hadn’t known the face of his child. He had looked past her and through her, and she had woken up with the tears still stinging on her cheeks.

Stupid. A stupid waste of water.

It was strange, she thought: she was ready to die, but not ready to give up. Even now, she would give anything for those few drops of water back, enough to keep her on her feet maybe half an hour longer, enough to bring her a half-mile closer to her quarry. She didn’t want to die here, stumbling and falling like a drunk on the bone-white hardpan. She didn’t want to die now, after God only knew how many hundreds of miles and years, didn’t want to watch the distance between her and the man in black grow again now, now when she was so close to closing it. If she was to die, she had hoped it would be quick and without doubt, that she would be felled without ever giving up.

She sucked on her weathered lips, as if she could draw some moisture from them, and went on walking. She looked at her boots, not at the road ahead, putting all her focus into keeping moving. Somehow, it seemed vitally important that she keep moving.

Looking up for a moment, she thought maybe she saw something in the distance, in front of the mountains – close, too, maybe five miles. But she blinked, and the desert shimmered with heat, and whatever she had seen – if she had seen anything at all – was gone.

A few minutes later, she fell down. She skinned her palms on the hard ground, leaving a few drops of blood that were quickly sucked up by the thirsty desert, as if they had never been.

“You too, huh?” she said to the desert, as she pushed herself to her feet, and then laughed, a dry cackle that seemed to echo in the back of her throat. _Oh Jesus, I’m losing it_.

She got up, slow, careful, and looked down at the red scrapes on her flaking, sunburnt hands. There was something horrible about them, about the normality of the blood that oozed, slow and easy, into ruby beads on her rough skin. Susan lowered her face and sucked the blood from her hands, and although the salt only made her thirstier, she did not regret it. It felt only fair, to take that colour and vitality back into herself, and maybe get some of it back to her heart.

_Jesus, I’m losing it_ , she thought again, and stumbled forward one step, then another, and another. Once she got moving, it was easier to keep moving than to stop – that had always been the trick. Lean forwards, as if into the wind, and keep one foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. Nothing to think about but that: one foot in front of the other, then the other, then the other.

It was almost an hour before she fell down again. This time, she caught the side of her face, and felt as if she’d been slapped. For a moment she lay there, gathering her strength and her breath, and then she pushed herself onto all fours, and as she started to struggle back to her feet, she raised her head.

The smudge on the horizon she’d seen before had resolved itself into a building, so close it took her breath away. No… _two_ buildings, the wood of their construction so old and windblasted that it was slowly becoming sand, surrounded by the remnants of a rail. One was a stable: the shape was unmistakably familiar. The other might have been a house, or an inn; a waystation for the coach line that had once passed through this way. Both buildings leaned at drunken angles, looking as if a breath of wind might knock them down – but many winds must have passed through this way, and the buildings still stood.

And in the thin line of shadow cast by the house, someone was sitting.

That realisation jolted through Susan like lightning, and suddenly she was on her feet, thirst and weariness and pain forgotten, and not only walking but _running_ , her guns coming to her hands like faithful dogs to heel, because here he was, here at last, and she might still die, but she could die facing the man she’d hunted all this way. (That the figure slumped in the shadow might already have been dead did not occur to her, and would not occur to her for some time later)

“Get up!” Her voice was as sand-blasted and dry as the buildings, a hoarse crow-call. She crashed through the fence-rail, which splintered obligingly to let her through, and her guns were at the ready, hammers drawn back. “Get up, you fatherless bastard! You’re covered! You’re…”

The figure moved and stood, and the guns fell from the gunslinger’s nerveless hands. It wasn’t the man in black. Even through the haze, even with her mind clouded by heat and thirst, she could see that it wasn’t him. This figure was… was small, a child, with white-blonde hair and pale blue eyes, which stared at her almost with disinterest.

“Patrick?” Susan said, in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. She had thought there was no more moisture left in her, but even so, tears managed to fight their way into her eyes. The gunslinger smiled, slow and hideous, and did something she had never done before: she fainted.

 

**II**

When she woke, she had been rolled onto her back, half-in and half-out of the shade. That seemed to be as far as the boy had been able to move her, but he had clearly done what he could to make her comfortable; there was hay under her head, and her hat had been tilted forwards to shade her face better. And there was a coolness, a blessed coolness. Raising her head a little, she saw that the front of her shirt was dark and wet.

Water. He had brought her water. Her tongue seemed to swell in her mouth at the sight of it, and when she licked her lips experimentally, there was water there too, beading on her skin.

The boy was hunkered beside her, watching her solemnly. When he saw her raise her head and open her eyes, he turned quickly to reach behind him, handing her a dented tin can full of water. Her eyes flicked to his face, then to the can, and with shaking hands she took it from him. It was one of the hardest things in the world, at times like these, not to gorge oneself: she managed to settle for a sip, and even that made her throat clench. She waited for it to settle, then took another sip, and handed the can back to the boy so she could drag herself more fully back into the shade. All the time, her eyes were on him, fixed, unblinking.

He wasn’t Patrick. He was real. She could see the sweat beading on his upper lip, not yet marred by any sign of a moustache; could see the minute shift of his hair in the hot breeze. She could smell him, and when she took the can back from him, she could feel his fingers brush against hers.

“My guns?” she said, at last, her voice a low creak.

The boy looked a little sheepish, and fumbled at his jeans. One of her pistols was there, shoved into the waistband in lieu of a holster. “The other’s in your purse, ma’am,” he said, with studied politeness. He didn’t move to hand her gun back, though, and truthfully, Susan could appreciate that. He wasn’t a fool, anyway.

“You could shoot your balls off, carryin’ it that way,” she told him, and a smile twitched at the corner of her mouth.

Uncertainly, as if remembering how, he smiled back. He looked almost like he was humouring her, and mayhap he was. “Yes, ma’am. Would you want something to eat?”

“Not yet.” The sunstroke made her head spin, even now she was in the shade – perhaps especially now. The water sat awkward and heavy in her stomach, as if it wasn’t sure where to go. “What are you?”

The boy blinked at her, and that little smile vanished again. He looked confused, and a little alarmed, as if he was just realising that she might be mad – might be dangerous. “Huh?”

“Who. Who are you?” She splashed half the remaining water on her face, shaking it off. It felt almost ridiculously luxurious, to waste water that way.

“My name is John Chambers. You can call me Jake. I have a friend – sort of a friend, she works for us – who calls me ‘Bama sometimes, but you can call me Jake.”

“Jake.” She repeated it, looking at him searchingly. Replacing _Patrick_ with _Jake_ in her mind. Looking at him, she still saw Patrick. It was unavoidable, and it was unfair. “I’m Susan.”

“Oh.” And she could see him filing that away, too. There was some fear in his eyes, a little curiosity, but mostly he seemed almost unreasonably calm, as if this was all a dream he was just trying to settle before waking.

For a moment, they were both quiet. She took another sip of water, and looked away. Jake went on watching her. She could feel his eyes on her, even without looking. All right. That was fair.

“I didn’t know what to do when you fell down,” he said, at last. “I thought you were going to shoot me.”

Susan shook her head, slowly, remembering. “I thought you were someone else.”

“Patrick?” He answered his own question almost at once: “No, you mean before that.” She nodded, and he looked at her sidelong, from under very long, pale eyelashes. “…Did you think I was the priest?”

It was like a jolt of icewater down her spine. Susan sat bolt upright, and immediately regretted it: her stomach lurched and emptied itself, and she doubled over, emptying the little water she had drunk back onto the dry ground. Her eyes burned, and so did her throat.

“The priest,” she repeated, when her throat had finished spasming, and looked back at Jake as she wiped her mouth. “What priest?”

Something in her expression made the boy shift uncomfortably, moving away a little. She could almost see him thinking of the gun in his waistband. “He camped in the yard. I was in the… the house, over there. Or maybe it was a depot. I didn’t like him, so I didn’t come out. He came in the night and went on the next day. I hid.” He looked up at her, blue eyes sharp. “I would’ve hidden from you, too, only I was sleeping when you came. I don’t like people. They fuck you up.”

Susan let out a little scoffing laugh at that. “They sure do,” she agreed, and looked down at the dregs left in the tin can. After a moment’s consideration, she drank them, and waited for her stomach to accept the water. It didn’t take as long, this time. “What did he look like?”

Jake shrugged, holding his hand out for the can. “There’s more water.”

“Later.” She gave him the can, but her eyes stayed on his face, on those startling blue eyes. “What did he look like?”

“Like a priest, I guess. He was wearing… black things.”

“Like a hood and a cassock?”

“What’s a cassock?” the boy said, blinking.

“A robe.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s about right.”

So it had been him. The knowledge ought to have filled her with fire, with purpose. She should have grabbed the boy by the shoulders, shaken him, demanded to know when it had been, how long. She should have revelled in it, in the narrowing of the hunt, in finally getting better spoor than neatly-laid fires and scraps of bacon in the ashes.

Instead, she felt trepidation. Not at the prospect of meeting the man in black again, although he was certainly dangerous: she had thirsted for that meeting for years, and no matter which of them died, she was ready. Her discomfiture was at the boy. She couldn’t stop looking at him, at that thatch of blonde hair, the colour her own had been once upon a time; at his clear blue eyes; at the hunger that had sharpened the soft, childlike line of his jaw.

_A great king got me with child, once_. Not this child, no, but one enough like him that to look at Jake hurt, woke a gnawing ache inside her that she had managed to push down and forget for years. Woke up grief, and the past, and other things she had tried so long to keep buried.

She got to her feet, swaying. Her head spun, and she almost fell down again, her vision blurring and flashing white at the edges.

“You said there was more water.” Her voice sounded as if it came from a distance, as if there was a long tunnel stretching out between her and the boy, and the waystation, and the world.

He nodded, and – despite his obvious fear, despite what he’d said about not liking people – got to his feet to offer her an arm. He was polite, she had to give him that. Almost too polite. Probably his parents, or the friend who’d called him ‘Bama, had taught him to offer help to little old ladies.

Well, she wasn’t little by any means, and she hadn’t ever felt like she could be much of a lady, but she did need his help to stand. Maybe, a little, she also needed his help to really believe he was solid and present. She tried not to lean too hard on him, but judging by the way he winced, she still gripped his arm too tightly. It was a thin arm, and the cloth of his shirt didn’t feel like anything she’d ever come across before. Rough, but soft. She closed her eyes, gathering herself, and gestured for him to lead on.

At the back of the stable, in a dark little room, was an ancient pump. She had seen others like it, in dry places, but never one so big; it gleamed dimly under the dust and tarnish, against the old wood and straw, and seemed almost to glow from the shadows. A chrome pipe extended from the side, and glancing at Jake, she knelt beside it, pushing the ON button. She waited. After about half a minute, the water began to flow, with a heavy thumping that seemed to come from deep beneath them.

“Who’s Patrick?” Jake asked, suddenly.

Susan bowed her head, and held out the can with shaking, gnarled hands, listening to the glug-glug-glug of clear water against metal.

“He died,” she said, in a voice that did not invite further questions. “He’s a long time gone. That’s all.”

Jake opened his mouth, and then closed it again. Slowly, he settled himself down onto a little pile of hay, watching her, assessing her. Her gun still jutted from his waistband. The pump hammered and flowed. Otherwise, all was silent.

 

**III**

Sitting now in the shade inside the stable, the gunslinger sipped the water and watched the boy watching her. It had been perhaps twenty minutes since they came inside, and the pump was just starting to dribble to a stop.

“When did he come through here?” she asked at last, evenly.

“I don’t know.” Something must have lit in her look, some impatience, because Jake flinched away again, looking at her warily. “I _don’t_! Since I got here, every day’s the same!”

Susan took a deep breath, and tried to push that impatience back down. Now that she’d drunk a little more and started to steady herself, it was striking her how much time she’d wasted here already. Boy or no boy, this was the first lead she’d had on her quarry since leaving the dweller’s hut, and now that she’d pulled herself together to ask, it was actually _more_ frustrating that he couldn’t answer. “Sure. Sure, I get it.” Another deep breath. “Give me your best guess. Has it been a long time?”

“No. Not long. I haven’t been here for long.”

“A week? A month?”

“Yes.”

Again, she felt frustration flow up inside her; again she pushed it back down. “Which one?”

“A week.” His jaw worked under his skin, as if he were chewing on something. “Maybe two? I don’t know. It was…” He blushed deeply, and looked away, mumbling. “I went to the bathroom three times since then, that’s all I can count. To, to go number two, I mean. To...”

“I know how shitting works,” she said patiently, unamused by his embarrassment. “You don’t have to play about with words. Three shits.” Which would make the man in black closer than he’d ever been – probably a week and a half at most. She hadn’t been excited at the thought before, but now she was. Now she was positively burning with it. “What did he do here?”

Jake worried at his lip, which was already chapped and flaking, and shrugged. “He just sat there.” And she saw in his eyes that he was, quite suddenly, close to crying. “He didn’t even drink or anything. He didn’t even build a fire. He just sat there.” His voice quavered and broke. “I was scared. I’ve been scared every day since I got here. I don’t think he even slept. He just sat.”

“Aye. That sounds like him.” She was almost trembling. So close – _gods_ , so close! A week, maybe two. She could close that, maybe even before they reached the mountains.

But something else was nagging at her now, too. Something else in what the boy had said. “Jake, how _did_ ’ee get here?” Across miles and miles of man-killing desert, desert that had almost been the end of someone as hardened as her. Across all those miles and weeks of travel, still standing. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder until now, and she could have kicked herself for it, because surely it was the most important question of all: _how had he gotten here_?

He shrugged again, miserably, and hugged his knees to his chest. “I don’t know.”

“Well, where from?”

“I don’t _know_!” His voice was rising now. She thought, not as dispassionately as she would have liked, that he was probably close to breaking point. “I don’t know, okay? I did know! I knew when I came here, but now it’s all fuzzy, like a bad dream when you wake up. I have lots of bad dreams. Mrs Shaw used to say it was because I watched too many horror movies on Channel Eleven.”

The gunslinger blinked. It wasn’t the nature of what he said – she’d dealt with enough people on the edge of hysteria not to be unsettled by this outpouring of apparently random information. It was the fact that she didn’t understand any of it.

“What sort of a channel?” She leaned in a little, a wild, rather hopeful thought occurring to her. “The kind you’d run a beam through?”

“What?” Now it was Jake who looked completely nonplussed, though still with that fragile horror just behind his wide blue eyes. “No, it’s TV.”

“What’s teevee?”

“It’s…” His face creased, and she thought _now, now he’ll surely cry_ , but instead he just put his hand to his head as if it hurt. “Pictures.”

“Did your Mrs Shaw tote you out here?”

His frown deepened, his lips trembling faintly. “I don’t know. I just _was_ here.”

“Who’s Mrs Shaw?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“I don’t remember.”

The gunslinger sat back on her heels, and rubbed the bridge of her nose wearily. Why was she still asking, she wondered. Why was she still here? He’d mentioned food, and there was water here: she ought to stock up on both and get back on the trail. There were no answers here; there might be answers ahead. “You’re no damned use at all,” she said, sharply, bitterly.

Now _the tears will come_. But they didn’t, although he screwed up his face and his lips trembled, and it was clear from that and from the frantic pitch of his voice that it was only force of will holding the tears back. “I can’t help it. I was just _here_! I don’t remember! If you’d come yesterday, I bet I’d have known what teevee was, and who Mrs Shaw was, and… and tomorrow I probably won’t even remember I’m Jake!” His voice was rising to a keening kind of wail, and the only wonder was that it had taken him so long. And he still, _still_ wasn’t crying. A soft part of her, deep under the armour, wondered whether she could ever have been so hardy in his place, as a child. “I won’t remember unless you tell me, and you won’t tell me, will you? You won’t tell me because you won’t be here! You’re going to go away and leave me here, and I’m going to starve or maybe burn up out here, and I didn’t ask to be no use to you! I didn’t ask to be here! I don’t like it. It’s spooky.”

Susan watched him quietly for a moment, wrapping both her papery hands around the can of water.

“Are you done?” she said at last, dispassionately.

He looked up at her, blue eyes welling but not yet spilling over, lips clamped together. There was a deep hurt in that look, a betrayal. Good. Sometimes people needed to be hurt to see what was in front of them.

“I didn’t ask to be here,” he repeated sullenly.

“Tough shit.” She sipped the water, swilling it around her still-parched mouth. “None of us asked to be here. We all come out bloodied and screaming, and we all just claw our way through what we’re given ‘til we go out the same way.”

_But that’s not true, is it, Sue?_ She had asked to be here. She had chosen it. She’d chosen to follow the gunslingers, to follow the Affiliation, to follow the trail. She hadn’t asked for how it turned out, but she’d known it could’ve turned out that way. She hadn’t asked to shoot Allie’s scar out through her once-pretty face, but her finger had still been the one to pull the trigger.

She’d _asked_ to be a gunslinger. She’d _asked_ her way out into this desert, to this waystation and this heat and this quietly shaking boy whose grief was fighting now with anger. He hadn’t had that chance.

So she thought, and she pitied him, but she did not soften. “You’re lookin’ like I pissed on your mother’s grave.”

He wrinkled his nose. He didn’t look like he was about to cry any more; now, he looked like he was going to hit her. She had always preferred that to tears. “Why would you say that?”

“Because.” She shrugged one shoulder, setting down the can of water, and leaned in closer to him. “Because I want’ee to survive, if that’s summat we can manage. Because puling and whining gets you nowhere out here, just loses you good salt water. But anger… anger, we can use.”

Jake cocked his head, frowning, and she could feel his eyes boring into her. _Your father looked at me like that,_ she thought, and could have kicked herself for letting the thought slip through.

“Are you angry?” he said, at last.

“All the time.”

“Is that why you’re being such a bitch?”

He seemed to have shocked himself with that. He’d at least succeeded in shocking _her_ , and she wondered why a word she’d been called a thousand times should still shock her just because it came from a kid’s mouth. For a beat, they stared at each other, and then abruptly, the blush started to rise crimson over Jake’s face. He flustered. “I didn’t mean… I mean…”

The gunslinger interrupted him with a harsh, cawing laugh. “Aye, you did,” she said, and she was still smiling - more than she had in a long time, she thought. “You meant just what you said, and you damned well should. I am being a bitch. Wouldn’t still be following that asshole’s scent if I wasn’t a bitch at heart.”

He looked at her with some confusion, as if he didn’t understand the joke, but she didn’t care.

“You mentioned food?”

“Uh… yeah.” He was still looking a little dazed. He wiped the damp patches under his eyes, clearing his throat, and got to his feet. His knees popped a little when he did, but he stood straight enough, a handsome boy who she was sure would one day grow to be a handsome man. If he lived that long. “Yeah. There’s some dried meat. Not much, though,” he added, defensively.

“I don’t eat much.” She saw the look on his face, and softened, just a little. “I’m not going to leave you with nothing. I’m a bitch, not a reaver.”

“What’s a reaver?”

“Never mind.” She got to her own feet, feeling her hips and knees and spine crackle. _Gods, Susan, you’re getting old_. “We’ll eat, and you can tell me what you do remember. All of it.”

He looked up at her dubiously, and she could see him calculating, assessing her intentions. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Then let’s see what sense can be picked out of it.” She made it a couple of steps towards the door before her head started spinning and she had to stop, swaying faintly.

In the end, they ate there. She sat down, and let the boy run off to fetch the food – a few strips of jerky, on what looked like an ancient, beat-up breadboard. _Not much_ , he’d said, but to her eye, after days and days of nothing, it was a feast. More importantly, it was enough to keep her going for at least three or four days more. Long enough to cross the desert? Maybe, maybe not. Long enough to try.

She picked a small chunk, and chewed it slowly, the salt catching at the cuts and blisters inside her mouth and stinging at her chapped lips. As she chewed, she listened.

Jake hadn’t been lying when he said there wasn’t much he could remember. Snatches, that was all, of a dream-world she didn’t recognise. There had been a big building, with open ceilings and a patio. A statue in the water, a woman with a torch (whether the statue and the woman were the same, she wasn’t clear). There were things to ride in the streets. The big ones, he said, were blue and white. The smaller multitude of them were yellow. He walked to school. Walked to school past statues in the windows. Big glass windows.

It was at this point that remembering seemed to start to pain him. A book bag. A brown book bag. Something he called a _tie_ , and made a motion at his neck that made her think of a noose. He was walking to school, and…

He was walking to school…

He sagged, as if punctured, and his face crumpled. “It’s gone,” he said, and turned his face away. “It’s all gone.”

The misery in his voice was so complete that it would have melted a heart of ice. The gunslinger’s heart was more granite than ice, but it softened a little, anyway. He looked empty – and, worse, he _knew_ he was empty. She knew how that felt, those missing spaces, the gaps that sucked at your mind like a loose tooth.

“I can make you remember, I think.” Now it was her turn to sound quiet – almost apologetic. Jake looked up, startled. She sighed, and rubbed her forehead with one hand, swallowing the last of the jerky. “No. I can. I’m sure of it.”

“How?” He sounded sceptical. She didn’t blame him.

“I can put you to sleep.” Something twitched under her face, a memory tugging at the muscle. “It’s a skill I picked up. Years and years back. I’ll put you to sleep, and you’ll remember. Do you want that?”

He looked at her with an almost puppyish eagerness, suspicion washed away for a moment under the tide of hope. He was very, very young, she thought, and bit her tongue. “Yes. Yes, please.”

“Alright.” She plucked a shell from her gunbelt, held it so it glimmered in the sunlight from the doorway. Then, like a gambler laying down an ace of spades: “Watch me.”

It took some time, to remind her hand how the movements went. It had been years since she did this, and although this skill, too, was one she had asked to learn, there was still an uneasiness to it. But some of that unease had always been in how easily it came back, once it started: how her fingers and her wrist and her whole body remembered how to make the bullet dance, up and over her knuckles, from thumb to forefinger and pinkie to thumb, glimmering like a fish in water, leaping like a March hare. Jake watched, first with scepticism and then with enjoyment, and last of all with a rapt, unyielding attention. Then, blankness, as his eyes began to slide shut.

Susan hated that blankness. She bit her lip, and kept the shell dancing, tried not to look at him or at her own hand, making those alien leaps and shimmers, until at last his head fell forwards onto his chest and he fell entirely into sleep. And she found, without surprise but without foreknowledge, that she was humming, one of those snippets of tunes that can hook itself into the brain whenever the conscious mind retreats enough to let it.

_Love, oh love, oh careless love… you fly through my head like wine…_

She snapped her lips more tightly closed. The shell fell, suddenly dead, from her hand to the hard ground. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe for tears, trying to push themselves out, trying to rise like Leviathan from the inky depths of memory. The gunslinger swallowed, and bit her lip harder, until the damaged skin finally gave way and blood welled, thick and salty, into her mouth.

“Jake.” She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, smearing the blood. “Where are you?”

 

**IV**

_He is going downstairs, clutching his brown book bag. Inside are his schoolbooks – Earth Science, Geography, Geometry – and his notepad and pens and a lunch Mrs Shaw made him. Mrs Greta Shaw is not his mother, and has never pretended to be his mother, but she keeps him ‘in the clean’, helps him with his homework, knows to cut the crusts off his sandwiches. She is the help, as she keeps reminding him with every clean-starched gesture. Not his mother._

_His mother is upstairs, he thinks. He rarely sees her. She seems to spend her time between the pill bottles and the beds of friends, sometimes with a break for a novel and a pick-me-up that’s probably vodka. His father is at The Network, working for The Network, where all the men seem to be just the same; blank-faced and empty behind the eyes, in sharp suits, doing what his father calls ‘too much Coca-Cola’. His parents do not hate him, but sometimes John ‘Jake’ Chambers thinks they have forgotten him; left him to a succession of nannies and tutors and the starched-apron care of Mrs Shaw. And to the Piper School, where he is headed now. The Piper School is a Good School. It is a Private School, a Nice School, and most of all, it is a White School._

_Jake Chambers does not hate the Piper School. Not consciously. There are a lot of things Jake Chambers does not hate consciously. School, and the parties his parents throw, and his father’s professional friends with their too-wide smiles. And his father._

_He is on the street now, ‘hitting the bricks’, he is on his way. His mother always leaves him money for the cab fare, and he knows this, but he walks whenever the weather is fine enough. It is fine today, the sky a very un-New-York blue, the breeze fragrant with promise. Jake Chambers walks through it with unknowing, unmeaning coldness. He has lived too long among professional people, and without knowing it, has become professional himself. His blond hair is parted sharply down the middle, his tie perfectly straight. He talks like a grown man, with unconscious precocity, and has never understood people._

_Down the street now, past Brendio’s, the big plate glass windows with their blankly staring mannequins in expensive clothes. He hates those mannequins, and does not know why: does not consciously hate the cold and the professional, does not yet hate himself. Later, after school, he will go bowling. Perhaps he will stop for a soda, with the cab money._

_On the corner, he pauses, and breathes deeply, watching the traffic go by: blue-and-white buses, a police cruiser with its lights off, yellow taxicabs, a Mercedes-Benz. Someone, somewhere, is playing the Doors on a boombox. A black man across the road is selling pretzels from a cart to an elderly woman in a black hat. Jake Chambers rocks on his heels, waiting at the curb._

_He sees the man who kills him from the corner of his eye. A swirl of black, a sudden pressure in the small of his back, and then he’s falling, lands hard on the tarmac, still clutching his brown book bag._

_The blue Cadillac leaves black trackmarks over the brown book bag, and over the boy’s back. There is screaming. Jake is dimly aware of the screech of tyres, the grey Ford swerving to miss him, the salt taste of blood in his mouth. Blood in his eyes, too. Blood everywhere. He wonders where it has all come from, and whether Mrs Shaw will be very angry at the extra laundry._

_Behind him, a voice: “I am a priest. Let me through. Last rites… Act of Contrition…”_

_Jake cannot turn his head. He is faintly aware of why this might be, but his mind refuses. A figure hoves into view, the hem of a black robe, and it is then that horror grips him. He opens his mouth, or thinks he does. He pulls away, or tries to._

_In the distance, the radio has quit the Doors and moved on to the Beatles. The pretzel vendor is running to his side; the driver of the Ford pukes and starts to run away. The sky above the man in black is very, very blue. Somewhere not all that far away, a statue in the water holds up a lamp and welcomes anyone who wants to come into this world._

_Jake Chambers dies in a pool of blood on Fifth and Forty-Fifth, still wondering whether this will make him very late for school_.

 

**V**

She didn’t wake him after he had told his story. She might have done, but it would have been cruel. She looked at him, heard the tremble in his voice when he spoke about the priest and the Act of Contrition, and she acted out of mercy. Before sending him into a true sleep, she asked if he would like to forget. She was not surprised by his answer.

“Forget, then. And sleep.”

He lay there now, some time later: his breathing was slow and peaceful, and he looked small and harmless. He wasn’t harmless. She knew that as surely as she knew the feel of gunmetal. She didn’t know yet how he would kill her, but he would kill her. She could see the shape of it in him, in the gentle line of his mouth and the steady rise and fall of his ribs. Nort first, and now this. Resurrection was growing to be a hobby for the man in black, it seemed.

Still, she couldn’t help but watch him, and couldn’t help the knowledge that whatever trap she had been set here, she would run into it headlong. Just as she had in Tull. Just as they had in Mejis. Just as they had at Jericho Hill.

But that was in the future, and the future, like the past, was a long way down a very unsteady road. _Cheer up_ , as her father had been fond of saying. _It might never happen_.

For now, there was a kind of peace in knowing that the trap was set, and knowing it had not yet sprung. There was peace in watching the boy’s fingers twitch and curl in his sleep, his profile high and fine, his blond hair blown by his own breath. The gunslinger sat back on her heels, her hands draped in her lap, and watched him. After a while, she began to sing – a song her father had sung to her when she was too young to see him as more than warm smiles and gentle hands; a song she had sung over a too-grand cradle in a land that had been dead for centuries.

_I wish I could share  
All the love that's in my heart_

_Remove all the bars  
That keep us apart_

She reached out, still singing. Her voice was low with age and crackling with disuse, but still tuneful. Her hand lingered for a moment just by his head, a fraction of an inch from his blond thatch of hair, and paused there. That hand had been steady for uncounted years, and could have shot the wings off a fly at a hundred paces, but now it trembled like an old woman’s.

Jake stirred in his sleep, and smiled faintly, making a sound that was not a word. Snatching her hand back as if she had been burned, Susan pulled back and jumped to her feet. Her breathing was loud in the silence.

She had thought she might go outside, pace until the evening had cleared her head. Or perhaps draw more water at the pump – not only to drink, but perhaps even to wash. In the end, she found herself settling on a little pile of hay, digging through her gunna, and as she watched the boy and wondered at what he had told her, what he was and might be to her, she began to unbraid her hair. Once, it had been golden. Once, she had sat at a high window and dreamed of this boy.

She sat in the shadows now, with her back to a crumbling wall, but she still counted the strokes of her hairbrush as she had when she was a dreaming girl at the window. Counted them like years gone by.

_One… two… three…_

_I wish you could know…_

_Ten… twenty…_

_How it feels to be me…_

_Fifty… fifty-one…_

_Oh, Roland. Oh, Patrick. Oh, my loves, forgive me._

_I wish that you’d see_  
What it means to be me  
Then you’d see and agree  
Every man should be free…

 

**VI**

When she woke, it was almost dark, and Jake was gone. She was lying in a nest of her own hair, her worn brush near her hand, and the moon was rising, framed by the door of the stable.

Getting to her feet, she shook her hair back and reached for her gunna. She ached, as if her whole body had just remembered how to feel the miles she’d walked, and her head was light, but she felt better. Amazing what a little water could do.

There was a small flame dancing on the step outside the other building. The gunslinger started towards it, her shadow long and black in the red light of sunset, her hair hanging around her shoulders like a cape. Jake looked up as she approached. He was crouched on the porch, sitting by a lit kerosene lamp.

“I was scared to burn it in the house,” he said, by way of explanation. “Everything’s so dry.”

“Ayuh. That’s wise.” She eyed the porch for a moment, and then, not trusting it to bear both their weight without collapsing into dust, hunkered down a couple of feet away. Jake watched her, unblinking, as she reached into her gunna for the makings of a cigarette.

“I didn’t think someone like you’d wear your hair so long,” he said at last. There was a sort of wonder in his voice.

She chuckled, low in her throat, and began to roll her smoke patiently. “Funny thing. I didn’t think there was someone like me.” Then, a little more seriously, “It saves cutting it. Anyroad, I used to be real proud of it when I was a girl. It’s funny how some things are hard to shake, like that.”

Jake nodded solemnly. “I like it,” he said, at last. “It makes you look… I don’t know. Like something out of a story, when it’s all down like that.”

“I like it too.” She finished rolling her cigarette, held it out to light it at the lamp’s little chimney. No hurry, no haste. She took a draw and let the smoke drift into the dusty air. “We have to palaver.”

Again, he nodded, although she saw a flash of interest and amusement at that word, _palaver_. Not one he knew, she surmised.

“Guess you know I’m on the prod for that man you saw.”

Another nod. “Are you going to kill him?”

“Could be. I don’t know yet.” The honest truth. He’d earned that from her, at least. She looked thoughtfully up at the dying sun. “He cost me a lot. I’d like to kill him.”

“But?” He’d talked about her looking like something from a story: now he was leaning in as if she _was_ the story, something to be told around campfires. He looked rapt, but somehow distant, as if this was something far away and not something that could affect him here and now.

“You’re a sharp kid.” She tapped ash onto the dust. “I need him to tell me summat. Mayhap take me someplace. To a tower.” The sky was turning from red to purple now, the last fingers of light dying from the horizon. She watched it. It was slightly northwards of due west.

Jake was beginning to fidget, not yet impatient but heading that way. He didn’t need to ask it out loud: she could _feel_ the question burning off him. _So what?_

“So I’ll be headin’ on tomorrow. You’ll have to come with me. There any more of that meat, but what you brought?”

He shook his head mutely, his mouth open just a little.

“Corn?”

Jake cleared his throat, and found his voice. “Some.”

“There a cellar?”

He nodded. His eyes were wide, pupils large and dark. “Inside. You pull up on a ring on the floor.” She waited for the words she could see trying to work their way out. She didn’t have to wait for long. “I didn’t go down. I was scared the ladder would break and I wouldn’t be able to get back up. And it smells bad. Real bad. It’s the only thing ‘round here that smells at all.”

“We’ll check in the morning,” she decided, and took another drag of smoke. “See if there’s aught worth taking. But we need to get moving ‘round dawn, so no later than that.”

Jake nodded. There was fear in his face at the thought, she saw, but there was steel beneath it. That was good. She couldn’t fault that. His throat bobbed, and he smiled, just a little, but it was wan and nervous. “I’m glad I didn’t kill you while you were sleeping. I thought I might. I thought maybe I needed to. But I didn’t, and now I won’t have to be afraid to go to sleep.” He fumbled at his belt, and then he was holding out her gun, the carved sandalwood grip towards her. His eyes darted down to it for a split second, then back up to her, as if he were afraid she might be about to punish him for taking it in the first place.

She reached over the lantern, feeling the heat of it on the lower part of her arm, and took the weapon. Her fingers closed on the grip, and she felt her resolve strengthen that little bit more, as if the steel of the gun could somehow be transferred to her spine.

“Thankee-sai.” Her thumb traced the mark of the Eld, etched into the wood who knew how many centuries ago and worn by the hands of all the men before her, and for a moment, the past loomed large – not her own past, but the guns’, and all the weight they bore. Once, she had meant to pass them on to her boy. Once, she had only been holding them in trust. They could not be hers, she had been told, never truly hers. She was not born to the High Speech or to high blood, she was not of the line of the Eld, not any kind of Deschain but only a gilly-girl who’d captured herself a boy above her station. She was not a gunslinger, and the guns were not hers.

She took the revolver, and holstered it. The weight of it made her whole again.

“Who is he?” Jake sounded rather timid.

The gunslinger tucked her cigarette into the corner of her mouth and reached back, beginning to braid her hair again. “Ask me another.”

“ _What_ is he?”

Her fingers danced through her hair, as the bullet had danced through her fingers. “He’s a bastard. But then, most of us still alive are. I think he’s worse, but who knows? Guess it’s a matter of where you’re standing.”

Jake chewed his lip, frowning, and nodded. “What are you?”

“I’m tired.” She slung the braid forwards over her shoulder, tied it with a leather thong. “I’m going back to the stable to sleep.”

“Oh.” For a moment, he blinked at her, owlish and alien in the lamplight. “Can I sleep with you? In the stable?”

The hurt that gripped her heart was a kind of homesickness. It wasn’t like her to dwell so much on the past. It wasn’t like her to grieve. She stood up, picking up the lantern as she went, and sniffed.

“If I say yes, will you keep asking me questions all night?”

There was something secret about his smile. “You said to ask you another.”

She had to grant him that one. She had to smile. Holding the lantern up, she tossed her cigarette to one side and the two of them walked, side by side, to the stable, their firelit shadows dancing on the hardpan.

 

**VII**

The next morning, she went down into the cellar.

Jake was right: it smelled bad. Worse than bad. It smelled like the apotheosis of dark cellars; like damp and swamp and old potatoes and carrots gone to rot. The gunslinger resisted the urge to cover her nose, and climbed down. No light – she had visions of the waystation gone up in a wink of flame, and that would do neither of them any good. The sky was grey with the dawn, and that would have to be enough.

The ladder creaked a little with her weight, but did not give. Sheltered from the harrowing of the desert above, it still seemed sturdy enough. She counted steps as she went down, and on the tenth step, she was standing on the hard-packed earth. The smell was stronger down here, heavy and damp, enough to make her woozy after the sterile scentlessness of the desert. The wooden beams overhead were low enough to brush against the top of her hat. There were spiders down here: pale things with big, dapple-grey bodies, fat and mutated. Some had eyes on stalks, some more legs than anything should. Whatever true thread they had once had, it was long forgotten.

She crushed one of them under her boot, and stood there in the middle of the cellar, patient and unmoving, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness.

“Are you all right?” Jake called down from the trapdoor. His voice sounded a little reedy, frightened.

“Fine,” she called back, and blinked a few times, focusing on the corner. “There are cans. Wait.”

They were stacked in the corner, in an old box with one side folded down. Vegetables, mostly: green beans and yellow beans ( _the musical fruit_ ), and a couple of cans of corned beef. The gunslinger ducked under the low beam in the corner and began to pile them into her arms, shaking off the spiders that had made their frayed, manic webs in the box. She climbed halfway back up the ladder, handed the first armload up to Jake, can by can. Came back down for a second armful, then a third.

She was just starting back to the ladder for the third time when she heard the groan.

She froze, a can halfway to her arms, and a slow terror slipped like ice into her bones. There was the groan again: low, dry, and unmistakeably the sound of something shifting. The inn was built on sandstone foundations, huge blocks that had perhaps once fitted together neatly, but time had warped and worn the fissures between them, which now zigged and zagged like great letters that no-one could ever read. Those cracks were doubtless home to the spiders, perhaps to snakes or worse, but that concern had never bothered Susan. What bothered her, and sent the ice in her spine shivering back up to prickle the hair on the back of her neck, was the sand trickling slowly and ceaselessly from one of those dark canyons in the stone.

“Come up!” Jake yelled. “Oh, Jesus, ma’am, please come up!”

Susan looked back at that square of dim grey dawn-light, at his face blocking a corner of it. She looked down at the sand pooling on the floor. She looked, without surprise, at her hand, which had fallen onto the handle of her gun.

“Go outside,” she told him, steadily. “Now. At least twenty paces. Count to two… no, three hundred. If I’m not up then, run.”

“Come _up_!” He was almost crying now, she could hear it in his voice. She drew her gun, and let the last of the cans fall to roll across the floor.

The hole in the wall was growing now. It was the size of a coin, now, and still growing, the sand slipping as if through an hourglass. She was afraid, but the fear was a cold and distant thing. It would grow to consume her, given time. She did not intend to give it time.

Above her head, through the roaring rush of her own heartbeat and the aching, deafening groan of the foundations, she heard the sound of hurried footfalls as Jake ran. The gun was cool in her hand. The sand stopped trickling. The hole was now perhaps two inches across, and the groaning, which had grown to fill the whole world, finally fell silent. From deep within the stone came the sound of heavy, laboured breathing.

“Who are you?” she asked, and her voice did not shake, or only a little.

No answer.

Susan took a deep breath, and ran her thumb over her gun’s grip. It took her a moment to formulate herself, to pull together the right words. In the High Speech, which was not and had never been her own, she raised her voice and _commanded_. “Who are you, demon? Speak, if you will speak, and if not, be still!”

“Go slow.” The voice was clotted, heavy. It was a voice she knew. The fear was no longer cold and dead: it was a living thing, grabbing at her heart and smothering her, stopping her breath. It was Allie’s voice that spoke. And somewhere in that foundation, she knew with horrid surety, Allie’s dead eyes stared at the darkness, her dead tongue worked against bloodless lips and loose teeth, her dead throat filling with sand, the gunslinger’s bullet still buried in her skill. “Go slow past the Drawers, gunslinger. Watch for the taheen. While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.”

“What does that mean?” It was an effort to keep to the High Speech, not to snap it in the drawling slang of her youth. “Speak on!”

But the voice, and everything else, was silent. The cellar was still. The gunslinger stared at the blackness of the crack in the foundations, and could not breathe.

It was one of the spiders that brought her back to herself: a big one, with twelve legs, landing on the back of her hand. It made her jump and twitch with an unconscious disgust, and then breathing and thinking and movement came flooding back in, and she brushed the hideous thing roughly off her hand and stamped on it.

“You bastard,” she said quietly, to the twitching spider and the empty crevice and the man in black, and she started towards the space the voice had come from, that canyon of darkness running into the sandstone. There was something still to be done, and she knew it. She was willing to break traditions when she had to – how else would a woman have come to bear those guns? – but some customs ran deeper still. Some things were inviolable. _Take the dead from the dead_ , they said, from In-World to the Clean Sea. _Only the dead speak prophecy._

The sandstone gave way easily to her fist. She punched it once, twice, adding little fragments to the pile of sand at her feet, and reached through the wall. It was cold, colder than the cellar. Her fingers touched something smooth and cool, raised and fretted in places.

She drew out the jawbone. It was rotted at one end, where it should have hinged. The teeth leaned like stakes in the fence outside. Without the rest of the mouth, it still seemed to grin at her. She looked at it with thin-lipped distaste, and shoved it unceremoniously into her back pocket, holstering her gun.

On her way out of the cellar, she took four more of the cans, and left the trapdoor swung back. Let the light in, she thought fiercely, as the spiders scurried out of the unfamiliar brightness. Let it kill them.

Jake was halfway across the yard, crouched on the white hardpan with his hands to his head. When he saw the gunslinger duck outside, he let out a little scream and stumbled back two or three steps, then ran full-pelt towards her, crying. His arms flew around her, his head thudding into her ribs hard enough to hurt.

“I thought it got you! I thought it got you, I thought…!”

“Nothing got me.” _Not yet, anyroad_. She wrapped her arms around the boy, and felt his warmth against her, his tears soaking into the dry, worn cloth of her shirt. She could feel his heart beat through his ribs. So fast, like a bird’s. So fragile. “Nothing got me, Jake. I’m here.” And he was here, and it wasn’t entirely true, was it, that nothing had got her? Love had got her, tight as a vice, tighter than fear by a long shot. _He carries your soul in his pocket_. Was there any trap surer or more vicious than love?

“Was it a demon?” His voice was muffled, thick with tears and dampened against her breastbone.

“Aye.” And that was all. She loosened her grip on him, and pushed his hair back from his forehead with one hand, an unconsciously motherly gesture. “Don’t dwell on it. We don’t have to go back there any more. What you ought to worry over is what’s ahead.”

They picked up the cans she’d dropped, and the ones she’d passed up to him before, and went to the stable. Some of the cans fitted into her pack; the others she wrapped into the blanket she’d slept on. It was heavy and hot, but it would do to hold them together. Without speaking, she went to start the pump, to fill up the waterbags.

“You take this,” she said, holding one of the waterskins out to him. It was the first thing she’d said in almost twenty minutes.

Jake, who had followed her into the little pump room, nodded and took it without question. That raptness she’d seen the night before was back, a kind of wonder that was quickly guarded.

“Wear it around your shoulders. Like this.” She watched him critically as he slung it over one narrow shoulder. “Is it too heavy?”

“No.” She doubted he would have told her if it was. “It’s fine.”

“If you drop down with a sunstroke, I’m not carrying you.”

“I won’t get a sunstroke.”

The gunslinger considered him for a moment, then nodded curtly, straightening and turning back to where she had left her packs.

“You should let me take one,” Jake said, conscientiously, as she started to load herself up.

No doubt his Mrs Shaw had drilled that into him, she thought. A gentleman should always offer to carry a lady’s bags. She almost laughed. “What did I say about sunstroke?”

He looked almost comically abashed. “Yes’m,” he mumbled, and actually shuffled his foot, as if she’d scolded him.

She slung one waterskin over her shoulder, the other around her waist. The blanket-pack of cans she knotted into a kind of papoose, as loose against her back as she dared. They bumped against her hips as she walked, and her back would quickly become a swamp of itching sweat, but it was the easiest way to carry them, and it left her right hand free for her gun. In the left she carried her pack and her poke. The jawbone dug, not uncomfortably, against her bony backside.

Outside, the sun had risen fully, to her disgust. The heat of it was like a hammer-blow, all the more so with the weight of all her packs. She would have given her eye-teeth for the mule again, old and sick though it had been, but that mule had been dead a month or more. She had to be her own mule now.

The boy walked beside her, the rawhide-tied ends of the waterskin hanging almost to his shins. He walked so lightly that she found herself wondering, even now, whether he was here at all. The waystation watched them with empty, rotted-out windows.

The gunslinger and the boy beside her turned their backs on it, and with the desert heat still pressing in on them, they walked towards the mountains. Their dark shapes blurred, wavered, and finally disappeared into the blank whiteness of the desert.

In the cellar, nothing breathed or moved. Even the spiders were still. The waystation, baleful and hollow, settled back into emptiness.

Then there was only the desert, and the sun, and the heat.

 

**VIII**

Three days out of the waystation, and the mountains were deceptively clear now, as if one could reach out and touch them. The gunslinger reckoned that they had a good week still to travel, maybe more, but even so, every time she looked up she felt a jolt of excitement, as if any moment now they might tread into the greenery and shrubs of the foothills, fed by the slow trickle of meltwater from above.

She had expected the boy to slow her down, but he didn’t. He was tired – it showed in the slump of his shoulders and the drag of his feet – but that tiredness seemed to be pressed against a wall of his own inexhaustible willpower. He was tough, she thought, and it was a kind of toughness she recognised and responded to: the kind that can only be found through being sorely tested, the kind that keeps a person moving forwards not because they are afraid of what will happen if they don’t, but because they simply won’t allow it. He had decided that he would prove himself, and so, day by day, with calm self-assurance, he did.

He had stopped calling her _ma’am_ now. She appreciated that. He called her Mrs Deschain once or twice, and then clearly decided that it didn’t fit. For a day or so now, when they had spoken – which was rarely – he had called her Susan. It could have been a mark of growing familiarity and disrespect, but she didn’t think so. She thought it was the opposite. As he stopped calling her ma’am and picking words for politeness’ sake, the wonder in his eyes when he thought she wasn’t looking had grown.

It disturbed her, that worshipful way he looked at her. It disturbed her almost as much as seeing him from the corner of her eye, and seeing in him a child who had been dead for a lifetime. The speaking-demon’s words echoed round and around in her mind, like a knell: _While you travel with him, the man in black carries your soul in his pocket_.

Jake didn’t slow her down. He didn’t turn her from her course. He didn’t do anything to keep her from her quarry, and that disturbed her most of all, because it meant the trap was still to come.

They passed the symmetrical, sterile leavings of the man in black at regular intervals, and slowly, she became sure that they were getting closer together. On the third night, when they settled down to rest, she thought she saw the spark of a campfire on the mountainside. It did not excite her as she expected. Once, that sight would have raised her onto her feet, and probably had her walking another mile or more before giving in for the night, to close that space, to draw in on him before he could disappear. But then, she had been alone, and now, there was the boy. Besides, something had changed. She no longer thought he would disappear. She was becoming surer and surer that the man in black _wanted_ to be caught.

She helped Jake to set the fire – he was learning, and insistent on continuing to learn, but he still looked to her for help in building the camp – and drank a little, and then sat back on her heels to roll a smoke. On the horizon, over the mountains, lightning split the sky in the distance; the thunder was barely a murmur at this distance, and came long after. There was a grey haze of rain over the foothills, which had been almost constant since they came into sight. Jake watched it with a dreamy kind of intensity.

Susan watched him, watching it. Her thumb ran slowly over the ridges and pits of the jawbone she had taken from the foundation; she turned it over and over in her hands, thoughtfully, as the smoke from her cigarette trailed up into the darkening sky. The jawbone kept finding its way into her hands at times like this. The boy did not ask why.

He was counting, she saw, his lips moving slowly. She had to smile. Between worlds, it seemed, some things were shared.

“You can’t tell the distance that way,” she said, after some time. “Not any more. It’s soft.”

He looked back at her in surprise, blinking. He said nothing, but the question was in his look.

Susan shrugged one shoulder, and set the jawbone down for a moment on her knee. “My da taught me that trick,” she said, and tapped her cigarette ash into a neat pile by her side. “We used to sit out in the stable, to calm the horses, and he’d count off the miles. But the world was moving on even then, and he used to warn me it wasn’t so close a trick as it had been when he was a boy.” How long since she had spoken about her father? She couldn’t remember. Only his face remained, lingering in her memory. “And that was long ago. Things aren’t so hard-set as they were then. You’ve seen it in the sunsets, I’d guess, and the stars. A second ain’t a mile now. It’s a toss-up if a mile’s even a mile.”

Jake looked at her with undisguised confusion, and she felt a sharp pang. He didn’t understand, she saw. All this time here, and he didn’t understand. Maybe that was no wonder.

“What happened to your da?” he asked, quietly. It wasn’t what she’d expected.

“He was killed.” There had been a softness creeping, unrealised, into her expression. It was gone now, as if a shutter had closed. “Go to sleep. There’s a long way yet to go.”

Jake opened his mouth, and then closed it. He looked as if he had been slapped, but he did as he was told; turning his back on the fire, he lay down, and closed his eyes, and was still. Susan sat up a while more, turning the jawbone over in her hands and looking at the jagged teeth of the mountaintops, and then she stubbed out her cigarette and settled down. It had been a stupid question, anyway. It seemed to her that there could be no question what had happened to her da. He was dead. They were all dead. The world had moved on.

The next day, Jake fell down.

It was mid-afternoon then, and the sun was still high and merciless. He didn’t make a fuss, even now; he just crumpled, silently, and caught himself on hands and knees. His jaw set and his lips pressed together, he immediately moved to get to his feet.

She was at his side, her hand on his shoulder. She did not help him up, but pushed him back down. “Sit,” she told him, firmly.

“No, I’m okay.” He got his feet under him again, tried to stand. He was reeling. Her hand was still firm on his shoulder.

“Sit yourself, Jake,” she told him again, and he did. She squatted nearby, careful how she settled herself, giving him her shadow. “Drink.”

“I’m not supposed to ‘til…”

“I’m telling you now.” She reached out, drew the waterskin from around his shoulders. It was mostly empty now. “Drink.”

He drank, three big swallows. She unslung the blanket from her back – mostly empty now, it would soon be easier to carry in her pack – and wetted the corner, dabbing it to his fever-dry wrists and forehead.

“We’re resting,” she told him. Her tone brooked no question, no disagreement. “Here’s a lesson for’ee, child. You’ve learned to keep going, and that’s the half of it. Now learn how to keep still.”

“Is that a gunslinger lesson?” His eyes were bright, although that might have been the fever.

“No. It’s a rancher lesson.” She considered a moment, then shrugged one shoulder. “Guess it might be both. I knew it well before I ever held a gun.” Then, ignoring the look of wonder and fascination on his face (as if this was the first time he had ever considered that there might have been a _before_ ), “Do you want to sleep?”

“No.” There was that shame again.

Susan sighed, and shook her head. “You ain’t learnin’. That’s your call. But you lie down now, and you lie still. Okay?”

“…Okay.” He looked sullen and ashamed, still, like he was being punished for something. He looked _embarrassed_. But he lay down, as she said, curling up a little to stay in her shadow as much as he could. By the time she had dug out her poke and begun to roll a smoke, his eyes had fallen closed and he was fast asleep.

She looked at him, lying there, so stubborn and so small, and she realised with a start that her eyes were damp. Her father must have looked at her this way, she thought, on that long-ago day when she had learned this lesson herself, when a girl no more than eight had been carried back from the Drop by a man with rough hands and warm eyes. She had woken halfway back to the ranch, she remembered, woken draped against her father’s chest and wrapped in his arms, and she had closed her eyes tight and pretended all the way home that she was still asleep.

As Pat Delgado had done then, she reached out and smoothed the child’s hair back from his face. Jake’s skin was dry and burning with fever, and he stirred under the touch, but did not wake. Susan’s smile lingered a moment, and then faded, as she sat back on her heels and took a drag of smoke.

_He carries your soul in his pocket_. There was the trap, drawing her in, and there was her, walking blithely to her own execution. And up ahead, there was the man in black, waiting. He was leading her out there, like one might lead out a horse with a handful of hay, and now she knew it for sure; he meant to be found.

And then what?

She couldn’t say. She thought Roland might have known. Cuthbert would have found interest in the question (and no doubt a joke; lively, wild Cuthbert who had gone to his death laughing). Her father would have pored over it. All she could do was let the question sit where it was: not sharp enough to hold her interest, not clear enough to be answered, just something to sit and nag at her until one day it would answer itself. One way or the other.

She sighed, and looked down at the boy, still sleeping peacefully. It wasn’t like her to linger on the past, but her mind was still on the Drop, and her father’s eyes, and a rancher’s lessons. _Now learn how to keep still_ , he had said, but it hadn’t been about the sleeping. Susan watched Jake’s chest rise and fall, watched the smoke drift up from her cigarette, and her mind went back.

 

**IX**

Before she was a gunslinger, she had been a rancher - other things, too, but always a rancher. And before she was a rancher, she had been a child. A wild little girl, who tore her stockings and wore boy’s clothes and ran barefoot on the Drop with her blonde pigtails streaming.

Her father hadn’t owned land, but he’d rented plenty, all along the Drop up to the edge of Eyebolt Canyon. He bred horses there, the finest in the Barony, big, threaded horses that could pull a plough all day or ride a full trek without breaking sweat. Susan had grown up around them, until she felt she could talk to them almost as easy as she could talk to another child – and easier, mayhap, because you could always know what a horse wanted from you.

On that particular day, what the horse wanted was help. She heard it screaming as she rode her pony up from the schoolhouse, and when she flew into her da’s office in the back of the ranch house, he took one look at her face and got to his feet, paperwork forgotten and be damned.

Ocean Foam, his bay, was faster than her pony could ever be. She rode pillion, clinging to the back of his shirt as they cantered up over the field, over to the long grass of the drop and the whine of the thinny in the distance. It wasn’t hard to find the horse that was screaming. All that herd he owned, but Pat and Susan knew every horse as if it were a child, and knew their voices and their ways.

The mare was lying on her side, her head raised, her swollen belly heaving. Blood darkened the long grass where she lay, and her eyes rolled back to the bloodshot whites, her nostrils flared and ears laid flat. Pat cursed and swung himself out of the saddle while Ocean Foam was still at a canter, pulling Susan down after him.

“What happened?” She didn’t want to ask. There was thunder on his face, and she didn’t fear him but she didn’t want to interrupt his mood either. And this was _hers_ , this problem. She felt that with a ferocity too big for her young body. She had brought him here, she had heard the screaming, and that made this _hers_ as well as his.

Pat shook his head, starting towards the shuddering form of the mare in the long grass. “You get ready, Sue. Could be I’ll need small hands.”

“ _Birthin’_?” She looked at him with no understanding, looked at the bleeding mare. “But she’s only nine months…”

“You get ready,” Pat said again, and there was steel in his voice that was at odds with the gentleness in his movements as he knelt beside the mare’s neck, skilfully avoiding her flailing hooves, and stroked her nose, murmured to her, until slowly she stopped screaming and thrashing and settled against his lap, her eyes still rolling wildly, her lips drawn back from her teeth. “She ain’t far enough along. You’ll have to get it out.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d helped with a birth. Small hands and deft fingers were a boon to any rancher, and Pat was a kind man but not the type to coddle. She looked at him with some doubt, but settled herself on her knees, rolled up her sleeves, and got to work. The foal wasn’t showing yet, but there was something spilling from the mother’s vagina, something thick and red and fleshy.

As soon as she got her hands into place, the mare screamed again, and kicked out, head thrashing against Pat’s grip. Susan let out a little squeak and dived back instinctively, but it was only an instant. Then her stubbornness, her sense of this problem as _hers_ , reasserted itself, and she scrambled back into place. The bloodied grass stained her too-big jeans with psychedelic smears of green and red. She grimaced, and pushed one hand inside the mare, slow and careful, trying not to hurt. The mare looked at her with those bloodshot, rolling eyes, and the pain couldn’t have been clearer if it was spoken. The _begging_.

She reached in and found the foal, half-in and half-out of the mare’s womb. Almost up to the elbow now, Susan felt the slick shape of it, the weak kick of its legs. It was alive. It squirmed a little under her questing hands, and she could almost see it, blind and incomplete, torn from the darkness. Its mother’s body tensed and closed around it, trapping it halfway between this world and the next. Her heart went out to it, this lost little thing, so helpless, so in need.

One of its legs was folded under it, still inside the cervix. Grunting with effort, Susan worked her hand in deeper, loosening it. Blood surged onto her lap, soaking her jeans. The mare’s body pushed against her, tried to force her out. Slowly, she worked under the foal’s caul, slowly and gently, easing its legs out. She broke the caul in the process, stinking wetness flooding out and washing off some of the blood, bringing more with it. The mare’s screams and snorts had died down now, her contractions weakening as exhaustion took hold. Her flanks, slick with sweat, heaved great rasping breaths. Susan bit her lip and leaned in closer, glancing up at her father.

“Careful,” he said, quietly. “Let her rest a moment.”

But the foal was so close now, and the blood went on flowing. Susan gritted her teeth and shook her head, getting back to work. She trusted her da implicitly, knew he was better than any veterinarian, but she could also feel the foal’s heart beating and the sluggish, effortful twitch of its legs, and most of all, she could feel its tiny chest heave as it tried to draw breath that couldn’t be drawn, tried to find air in that darkness.

“It’s _dying_ ,” she told him, and redoubled her efforts. He said something else, but she didn’t hear, intent on the foal and its spasmodic grasps at life, on the press of flesh on her hand as she pulled. One hoof broke out into the air, and then the other: slick and wet, hot to the touch. She let out a little, abortive cry of triumph and shuffled back to pull.

Pat let the horse’s head down into the grass and scrambled across to her. His hand was firm on her shoulder, his tone unyielding. “Let her rest, Sue!”

If she had looked up, she would have seen panic in his eyes, but she did not look up. She squirmed out of his grip, blinded to everything but the little twitches of the foal’s hooves, its efforts to drag itself out into the light. Pat grabbed after her, caught one of her pigtails, and let it go again, scrambling to his feet to try and pull her away. “Sue!”

She didn’t hear. She was pulling now, pulling with all the strength in her little girl’s body, and she felt the foal move against the now-unresisting confines of its mother, lubricated by blood, and here was the infant’s chest, and here its head, and then it all came out in a great wet rush, flooded into her lap in a wave of blood and fluid, and she cried out first in joy and then in horror. The foal was a mutated wreck, eyeless and hairless; its back was laid open in a crevice of at least an inch, its spine spilling out into the world; the cord was tangled and blue and caught in her fingers. She cradled the horrid thing in her arms, held it close, praying, while her father hurried back to the mare’s side to try and stem the bleeding.

In the moment before it died, the half-made foal managed to lift its head. She felt it look at her with its queer, eyeless face. She felt its pain. Then it spasmed, and fell still.

The mare was still bleeding out, too weak to kick. Patrick turned his back on his daughter and the misshapen thing she held, and turned all his attention to saving what might still be saved. There were tears in his eyes, for he loved every animal in his herd, and he knew that there were limits to what could be done.

Susan looked at him, at the dying mare, at the small, ugly corpse in her lap, and her vision swam with tears. She clutched the foal to her chest, dying her shirt crimson, and carefully laid it out in front of her, arranging it, rearranging it, trying to hide the eyeless face and the hole in its back. Pat swore loudly, still bending over the injured mare, and then swore again, louder still, and then she was on her feet and running, blindly and without direction, away from her father’s pain and anger and the mare’s accusing look and the blood on the grass.

She didn’t know how long she ran, or where. She just ran, the blood plastering her shirt to her chest, her heart thundering out of her chest, her tears smearing her face, ran until she fell, and then she lay there and cried until she could cry no more, and then, at last, still covered in blood and tears and the mare’s inner fluids, she curled up in the grass and fell asleep.

Pat found her there an hour later, when his anger had long since turned to fear, and he cried when he saw her. Later, he would sit her down and tell her what had happened, tell her a lesson she would carry with her all through the long and weary years; later he would wipe her tears away and tell her how sometimes you press on but sometimes you can only hold still; later they would bury the mare and burn her poor, mutie foal. Later still – though not all that much later, in the great grand scale of a life – he would be dead, all their ranch would be gone, she would be a murderer and burn down all the town.

But now, as the summer sun began to fade into evening, he gathered his daughter into his arms, careful not to wake her, and pushed the bloodied mat of her hair back from her face, and Pat Delgado carried his child home.

 

**X**

“Look!” Jake said, and pointed upwards.

They had been in the foothills now for two days, and their water was almost gone, but it didn’t matter. Soon, they would be under that cap of cloud, with all the water they could drink. The mountains were no longer a ragged thing on the horizon; now they towered over the travellers, like great unforgiving walls of a city long gone to dust.

Susan followed Jake’s pointing finger, up that wall of granite and basalt, up past the green plain of the foothills and the canyons and crevices and cliffs, past the straggle of shrubs and trees clinging gamely to the stone, up to the snowline and beyond. There, high above, she saw him. He was barely more than a fleck of black, without shape or substance, clinging to the cliff like a fly to a wall.

“Is that him?” Jake asked. His voice was hushed, almost reverent.

She couldn’t see a figure, could barely see that mote of darkness at all; it might have been a fleck of dust in her eye. But even so, she was sure. “That’s him.”

“Do you think we’ll catch him?”

She could stop all of this now. They could linger here, she and the boy. There was water, and food, and the shelter of the mountains. Nobody would disturb them. For a time, at least, they could linger and hold still.

The man in black was still climbing. She could see the movement, the slow zig-zag up that blinding, sheer whiteness. She could let him climb. Would he wait for them on the other side? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps it didn’t matter. All her life she had kept moving, kept putting one foot before the other. Perhaps it was finally time to hold still.

“We’ll catch him,” she said, and started up the scree of the hillside with the boy at her heels.


	5. The Mountains

**I**

The hardpan gave way to sawgrass, harsh and yellow; then to witchgrass, green and tangled; and then they came up over the last of the scree and it was an oasis, an Eden. The green was so vivid it almost hurt the eye, after all this time of blank, bright emptiness; real grass carpeted the level shelf of the hilltop, worked through with timothy, and the crickets were singing. It _smelled_ of green, smelled fresh and clear and alive. A flash of brown darted by, through the shrubs. Susan’s hand answered it before her mind did; the gun was in her hand, and crashing its fire, and then the brown took form and became a rabbit, twitching faintly as its blood dyed the grass beneath it.

She picked it up. It wasn’t quite dead yet, but a quick jerk of her hands on its neck cured that. Jake was watching her with his mouth open a little way, with a fresh wonder.

“Rabbit stew tonight,” she commented, and smiled. The smile came easily, for the first time in a while. It was hard _not_ to smile, now that they were so close to resting.

She slung the furry little body over her shoulder and beckoned him with her. He had been brave, she had to credit him with it. Brave, and shockingly resilient. Two days now, the crickets had been audible as they toiled on, mocking them with the promise of greenery and water and rest. Two days of scrambling over gravel and shale, of thirst and hunger and weariness, of the sun dazzling the eyes and burning the flesh. It had been maddening for _her_ to climb those two days, hearing the crickets, knowing how close they were, and dry out to a wisp within a stone’s throw of water. She could only imagine how much worse it had been for the boy. He had looked half-wild throughout, eyes rolling to the whites, flaking lips drawn back from his teeth. His hair was growing, no longer neat; he was no longer slender but _thin_ , and his clothes were thick with dust. But he had kept going, kept walking, kept pace with her even when every stride of hers was to or three of his, and she was proud of him for it.

That was the truth of it, she realised. She was _proud_. Now there was a feeling she’d not had in a long time.

Now she led him through the dwarf firs that clustered in the lush grass, and sat down there, not far from where the firs gave way to willows and the willows began to thicken into a veritable jungle. There was some temptation to that woodland; it would be well-shaded, and she was sure there would be water there, and probably plenty more to eat. But it would be hard going, and he was _banjaxed_ , as her da might have said. If he walked much further, he’d be asleep on his feet.

Besides, in a wood like that, there would be bats, and worse than bats. It was paradoxically safer out here in the open. She dropped the rabbit with her pack next to a little fir, and hunkered down.

“I’ll get wood,” he said, and moved to do so.

“The hell you will.” She gestured him back, a curt little flick of the wrist. “Sit yourself, cully. Hold still a while.”

“I’m fine,” he said, as he’d said more than once along the way, and as she had more than once along the way, she scoffed and said, “Didn’t ask.” Little rituals. Little cords growing between them. As she watched him sit, and got up herself to go and gather wood for the fire, she thought that might be the most dangerous thing of all. Little stitches, holding them together, but oh boy, didn’t they add up to a seam quickly?

When she got back, only a few moments later, he was asleep. A mantis was sitting in his too-long hair, cleaning itself, carefree as could be. She set down the makings of a fire beside him, and watched him for a while, smiling, before she caught herself at it and gave herself a mental slap on the cheek. _Pull yourself together, Sue. Work still to be done_.

The willow wood was deeper than she’d realised, and she was glad not to have brought him into it. It was growing dark, the criss-crossing shadows of the trees deep and confusing, and the sounds were a kind of hypnosis, the croak of frogs and the chirps of crickets, an intoxicating fullness of life. She thought that if she had not had an aim in mind, or if she had not had the boy to turn back for, she might have wandered there for a very long time, in waking dreaming.

But she would not let herself. She kept her eyes on the trail as she made it, watched in the gathering gloom for the signs of water, and at last she found a spring, well-guarded by frogs and peepers. She filled one waterskin and then another, and with them hanging full and heavy from her shoulders, headed back through the dusk and the mud – oh, _mud_! Glorious, after the endless dry, barren desert – to where she had left the boy.

He was sitting by a little fire, and when she broke cover and strode out from the woods, he turned and looked at her. He still looked tired – hell, _exhausted_ – but it was eclipsed by the pride in his face. It took her a moment to realise why, and then she laughed aloud.

“You got it lit!” After weeks of relaying his fires and lighting them for him, it felt a kind of triumph to her, too. There was that demon pride again, like a stab to the heart.

“I got it lit!” he agreed, and broke into a grin from ear to ear. It began to fade after a moment, though. “I would’ve done the rabbit, too. Only I don’t know how. Sorry.”

She brushed off his apology with a snort. “You’ve had no reason to kennit. You just watch me, alright?” Handing him one of the waterskins, she went back to where she had left her pack, and hunkered down there.

That night, she showed him how to skin and clean a rabbit, and how to pick out the herbs for a stew. He listened intently, hiding his yawns when they came, and watched with bright interest until at last she took pity on him and told him to go back to sleep.

She woke him when the stew was done, and he ate a little and then a lot, and when he fell asleep again, it was with his tousled blond head resting against her lap. It felt… good. It felt easy. Sitting by the clear yellow light of the fire (so different to those devil-grass fires out on the hardpan!), she thought again _we could linger here. Not just for a day or two, but for all our lives._ She could teach him to hunt, and to find safe sleeping-places, and there was wood enough for a cabin, water enough for a field. They could live here, she and the boy – _her_ boy – and her guns could come to the end of their long and bloody heritage, could be used only on rabbit and deer, and in the end they could be buried here, in the bones of the mountains.

In the morning, she waited for him to wake. It was almost noon by the time they packed up, refilled their waterskins, and started up the slope.

 

**II**

She had collected vines along the way, and she braided them as they walked. It was almost an unconscious movement, the brisk under-over weaving of it, looping the rope around her waist as she made it, keeping the tension on it. Despite the height of the mountains, she was beginning to believe that the climb would not be hard. _Ka_ , after all, was calling her, moving close to the surface.

But she hadn’t trusted _ka_ in a long time, and she wasn’t about to start trusting it now. So she made her rope, and when they settled for the night, on a ledge only a mile or so from where they had stopped before, she went on making it. Jake was looking down over the edge of the stone, at the willow wood and the green oasis where they had made their rabbit stew. She thought perhaps he missed it – that he, too, would have liked to linger.

Instead, he said suddenly, “I don’t ever want to go back there. Isn’t that strange?”

She considered. Over, under, over, under. “No.”

Jake frowned at her, but what he’d meant to say still clearly needed saying, and he pushed on with it. “It seems weird to me, that’s all. It was such a nice place. There was all that green, and she smelled like spring and honeysuckle, and we could have rested there a while. But I don’t wish we had. I don’t know why, but I don’t.” If he knew he’d said _she_ , he didn’t show any sign of it. “I had bad dreams there.”

Susan sighed, and put her rope aside, reaching for her poke. “I wondered if you’d remember.”

“Remember what?”

But she said nothing, just started to roll her cigarette and stared into the fire. Jake watched her for a moment, his jaw squaring briefly under the skin, and then looked away.

“Why don’t you ever tell me anything?” It wasn’t often he sounded his age, but he did now: a little confused and a little petulant, a child still trying to find the shape of things.

Susan was quiet for a very long moment. Just when he – and, to tell the truth, she – had begun to think she wouldn’t answer that, either, she turned and looked at him. “You sleepwalked into a trap. A demon almost killed you. I think she would have, if I’d not woken.” Shrugging, she lit her cigarette. “Does that make you feel better?”

“What?” He swung around to face her fully, eyes wide and betrayed. “No! Why… what happened? Are you serious?”

“That’s why I don’t tell you things.” She settled back on her heels, tucked the smoke between her lips, and reached for the rope again. “Once you start, there’s a road of questions a mile long. Better to not start.”

Jake appeared to chew this over for a moment, and then his face darkened. “That’s fucked up.”

She shrugged again, and went back to her work. Under, over. Over, under. A few more inches, a little more of a lifeline. If it would hold, anyway. She thought it probably would.

“I don’t believe you,” Jake said suddenly, from behind her.

“Hm?” She wasn’t listening any more, at least not consciously. She wrapped the length she had just braided around her hands, pulled to test it.

“That’s not why you don’t tell me anything. You’re hiding.”

Not _hiding something_. Just _hiding_. That was strange, strange enough to make her turn and look at him properly again. He stared back at her, unflinching. She could see herself reflected in his eyes, a crouched shadow against the firelight.

“Mayhap.” It came easier than she would have thought. “You’re sharp, Jake. Sharp’s good, but you mind you don’t cut yourself on it.” Her hands, which had slowed to a stop, began their work again. They were starting to ache, stiffening from the repetition of the movement, and she should stop before too long. But she went on anyway, for now, over and under and over. “Someone once told me smart girls go to Hell. Seems to me the same’s true for anyone.”

Jake blinked, looking abashed, but not incurious. “Who told you that?”

“More’n one person.” It took a moment’s thought to draw their faces to mind, and she didn’t linger on them. Some people didn’t deserve remembering. “Doesn’t matter. They’re dead, and I’m alive. Means the joke’s on them.”

She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. It wasn’t unkind, it was just… too clear. As if he could see right through her, through all the battered leather and calluses on her soul, and see right down to the core of it. She’d been looked at like that before, and those eyes had been blue, too.

“How old are you?” he said, abruptly.

“As old as my tongue and a bit younger’n my teeth.” It came without thinking, a little taste of her youth again, of Aunt Cord’s bitterness and Nan Goodwill on the corner who’d always chuckled when kids asked her age, and said she’d forgotten. At the time, Susan had thought that was bullshit. Now, she realised she’d forgotten, too. “There’s a long climb ahead, cully. Don’t use all your energy in talking.”

He lay down obediently, but his breathing didn’t even out as it usually did, and when she glanced up at him, she could see the glint of the fire reflecting in open eyes. They were a little too shiny, and a little too wide, and all at once, she felt sorry.

“Jake?”

He was quiet a moment more, maybe pretending to sleep. Then, muffled, “Uh-huh?”

“You got summat more to ask?”

Quiet. A low, slightly shaky breath. At last: “What happened last night? Really?”

Susan sighed, and coiled the rope to one side, flicking the butt of her cigarette into the fire. She worried at her lip for several moments, until she thought the blood might come, and she cursed herself for inviting it, but in the end, she told him.

 

**III**

She had been dreaming. In the dream, she saw them tear Patrick from the saddle, screaming for his mother. She hadn’t been there, not when it really happened, but in the dream she stood there and she screamed back, screamed that she was coming, she was there, only hold on a moment… But their hands were tight on his arms and legs, and his screaming was pain not fear, and she watched in cold horror as skin and muscle and sinew parted, as he was torn apart by the horde, and his blood flowed and went on flowing, and somehow torn to pieces he was still screaming, her little boy, her only love. “Help me!” he howled, and then it wasn’t that he was screaming, but something else: “ _Help him! Help him!_ ”

Susan woke in a cold sweat, a scream caught in her throat, and Jake was gone.

The crickets were silent now, and the dark was almost complete. By the last embers of the little fire he’d made, and the sickle of the moon above, she could see just well enough to make out his trail in the dew, once her night-eyes got their bearings. Then she was on her feet, stumbling as if fever-stricken, and she scrambled and ran in his footsteps, ran for the willow wood. The branches whipped at her hands, snatched her ankles. Under the shadow of those twisted, ancient trees, the moon was blotted out, the last of the light gone. She paused a moment, her breath heaving in her chest, and took a deep sniff of the air.

He didn’t smell good. Neither of them did, after all that long and sweaty trek. She was grateful for it; grateful because she _could_ smell the rank unwashedness of him, and that was enough to give her some bearing. Moving slower now, through grass that wetted her jeans up to the thigh and withies that slapped her across the belly and hips, she scrambled through a deadfall of ancient, rotted wood and leaves, up the slope, until at last she broke out into a clearing.

The moon was out again, the stars brighter somehow. They illuminated a ring of stones, black and leaning, and in the middle of the stones, a great granite altar, and in front of the altar, Jake. He stood in the darkness, swaying faintly. She called his name. He grunted negation, and in the smear of his face in the sparse moonlight, she read a kind of horror-ecstasy.

When she crossed the boundary of the stones, he screamed, recoiled. There was a look on his face of a soul at war with itself, of great pleasure doing battle with terror, and perhaps both feeding on the other. In the next moment, Susan felt it: the lust and sensuality was like lightning, too bright to bear, too sharp to see; it heated her loins and clutched at her chest and drew her nipples out to hard points on her sagging, empty breasts. The demon of the stones, the succubus, did not care if her victim was a man or a woman, it seemed; there was only need, and want, and a fierce, ecstatic desire that threatened to eclipse everything.

Susan acted on instinct, without thinking. With one hand, she forked the sign of the Evil Eye, screwing her own eyes tightly closed. With the other, she thrust out the jawbone, a ward and a threat at once. The heat and the softness and the want were torn away from her, as quickly as they had come, a visceral recoiling of the spirit that had brought them.

Jake screamed again, and the gunslinger’s eyes snapped open, into focus.

“You’ll not have him,” she said, almost a whisper, and then she was running, closing the distance between them, the jawbone gripped so tight that she would find later it had marked her hand. “You’ll not have him, bitch! _Not him too!_ ”

Her arms were around him then, and she held the jawbone inches from his glassy, warring eyes. “Look at it,” she hissed at him, and he moaned in her grasp, writhed away from the gleaming bone. “ _Look at it_ , Jake, see it very damned well, you hear?”

He didn’t scream, but he let out a wet, agonised sound that was altogether worse. Pain, blinding and complete, registered on his face, the pain of a divided mind. He fought her grip, tried to tear his eyes away from the jawbone, could not. At last, with a rattling moan, he jolted and went limp.

She caught him, and gathered him up, and bore him away from that place. At the edge of the circle, she turned back, to that formless thing of want and spurned jealousy.

“You’ll not have him,” she said again, more quietly.

_I can give you knowledge_ , the wind seemed to wheedle. _I can give you everything._

It was probably true. Prophecy was a gift of such spirits, she knew it very well. The succubus could guide her, could tell her what was waiting on the other side of the mountains. Could, perhaps, guide the next step on the way.

Eagerness. Hope. The demon surged, the smell of honeysuckle and attar in her nostrils, the warmth in her loins. _Everything. Anything. Give… help… love…_

“You don’t know shit about love,” the gunslinger said, and looked down at the boy in her arms. There was no point in it, anyway. There was nothing the demon could tell her that would change the road. “I do. God help me, I do.”

She held the boy close, and bit her tongue, and left that place where the standing stones grasped at the sky, like fingers of an empty, longing hand.

 

**IV**

When she finished, he was staring at her with some unreadable emotion in his eyes. She met his gaze, and shrugged one shoulder, flexing her hands to work out some of the cramp.

“Why didn’t I remember before?”

_Because I asked whether you wanted to, and you said no_. “Because some things are better forgotten.”

It wasn’t an answer, but he accepted it as though it was one, and lay back down. He didn’t sleep, though. She could see him lying in the gloom, eyes half-closed, staring into the embers of the fire. She wondered whether she had lied. She had forgotten a lot of things in all her years, perhaps even more things than she remembered, and yet here she was, and was she any the better for it?

“Who took Patrick?” His voice was hesitant, uncertain, but it still felt like a blow to the chest. “It _was_ Patrick you meant, wasn’t it? _Not him too_ – that was about Patrick?”

“Aye.” No sense in denying it. He was smarter than that.

“Who took him?”

“It doesn’t matter who took him. There was a war. It was impossible to know, and it doesn’t matter.” She was biting her lip so hard that it was beginning to wear a little raw patch, tasting sharply of salt. “What matters is who let him go.”

Jake half-rose onto his elbows, and even in the shadows, she could see the grief and concern on his face. “You.”

“Me.” She unrolled her blanket, and lay down herself, staring up at the night sky. “We’ve a long climb tomorrow, Jake. I don’t want to be up all night talking. Go to sleep.”

He didn’t go to sleep, but he was silent, and that was a relief. It was more than she could say for her own mind, which went on rolling and rumbling until dawn, robbing her of sleep.

 

**V**

The sun rose to its zenith and seemed to hang there for far less long than it had in the desert, before beginning the slow and inevitable descent back towards nightfall. They were above the woods and the grass now, and the cliffs rose harsh and jagged, unliveable and unlovely. A few shrubs and dwarf pines still clung to the ledges, sticking out at drunken angles from the mountainside.

The coolness of the air was a fine and refreshing thing, after the endless heat of the desert, but as they bore on up towards the snowline, it became less fine and less refreshing, more of an annoyance than a pleasure. It was still only cool, not cold, but it was difference enough. The snowcap towered above them, a promise and a threat of what was to come.

The beginning of the climb was easy. The granite had fractured and slipped over the centuries into something almost like steps, and though it was tiring, it was more a steep walk than a climb at all. By the time the cliffside began to even out to larger escarpments, they had come surprisingly high. Below them, the desert stretched, benign and languid, in a great white and golden curve across the landscape, fading into a dazzling horizon. It was hard to believe, at this distance, that they had almost died on that glimmering stretch. It looked desolate, but not deadly. Already, it was hard to really remember the thirst and the weariness and the blistering heat.

They stopped for the night when the shadows began to lengthen. There was no question of carrying on into the evening. The climb was easier than it might have been, the mountainside less sheer than it had looked, but it was a mountainside nonetheless, and a turn of the ankle or a misplaced grip could spell doom for an unwary traveller. On a ledge about five foot broad, Susan set herself to work on jury-rigging a shelter, anchoring the blanket to the hillside. She let Jake lay the fire. He was getting better at it every day, and now she felt she needed only to keep half an eye on him.

That night, they sat with their backs against the cliffside, a foot or so apart. She smoked, and pointed out the stars from time to time. They had shifted since she was a girl, and the constellations had changed, but some she still recognised: the Plough, the Serpent, Old Mother.

“What happened?” he asked, when she explained this.

She could only shrug. “The world moved on.” But that wasn’t an answer, and she knew it, so she tried to find a more thorough way of putting it. “It softened. It’s always been… I guess you’d say soft around the edges. In my lifetime, it’s grown faster, lost its direction, I guess. Do you ken the Tower?”

“No.” The boy frowned up at her. “What tower?”

Susan sighed, and was quiet for a moment, watching the smoke drift up to the starlit sky. “The Tower’s at the centre of things. Of everything. A kind of nexus of power, where all things come together.” She glanced at him, to see whether he was following. “They used to say it was a myth, when I was a child. Most still think so. But it is real, and it is the lynchpin of all things.”

Jake nodded, slowly, considering. She could almost see him turning the thought over in his head, trying to make it fit. “What sort of things?”

“Time. Space. _Ka_. I’m no philosopher, Jake, I couldn’t say for sure. But it ties things together, and I think something has changed with it. Something… I don’t know. It’s crying out.”

He looked at her strangely, but she didn’t care. She knew what she knew. That was all that had kept her sane for her whole long life: she knew what she knew, and she knew what she was.

“Why am I here?” he asked suddenly. “Is that the Tower, too?”

“The Tower. The man in black. Who knows?” At the back of her mind, she thought _she_ knew. She would never say it, though, not to him and not to herself. To say it would be to make it real. To say it would invite it in.

She watched the boy, her sacrifice, as he chewed over her answer, and as he settled for acceptance. It stung to watch him. It stung worse because he trusted her. Susan sighed, and ground out her cigarette against the stone. “Time to turn in, cully.”

They slept curled together. It was safer that way, in the narrow space between mountainside and sheer drop, and the cool air was just starting to grow cold. Susan lay with her arms around the boy and his head burrowed against her narrow, bony chest. He was warm, and fragile, and she could feel his heart beat under her hand. She loved him, she found, without surprise; loved him with a ferocity that ought to frighten her. She held him close to her, and slept, and did not dream.

 

**VI**

Jake’s hardiness, suspected in the desert, now came to the fore as the climb grew steeper and more difficult. He moved sure-footedly, without apparent fear, scrambling over clefts and up steep cliffsides where the gunslinger could find no purchase. Twice in the next day, he clambered on ahead with the rope, to help her across a too-difficult patch. Part of her was a little put off by that, by being bested by a child: the much greater part of her was glowingly proud. She had not taught him this, had not made him this kind of child, but she was proud nonetheless.

It was that next day that the snow began to greet them, gathered in small patches under rocks and in hollows. There was a patch of cloud over this part of the mountainside, clammy and freezing, which worked its way through their clothes and numbed their hands. After some consideration, Susan lent the boy her gloves, settling instead for wrapping strips of cloth like bandages around her palms. His hands were beginning to callous up, but only beginning; there were raw patches all over the joints of his knuckles, cracking in the cold and damp. Her skin was thicker, and she was more able to drive the shivers out of her hands.

That afternoon, they found a single footprint, stamped into one of those white puddles of snow. Rather, _Jake_ found it. Susan almost walked into the back of him, he stopped so sharply. He stared at the soft-edged mark of the man’s boot as if the man in black himself might spring fully-formed from it, and when Susan cleared her throat and clasped the boy’s shoulder, it took him a moment to react.

“Go,” she told him, not unkindly. “The day’s getting old.”

He went.

That night, they did not speak. They did not hold palaver, as they had the night before. They pitched camp on a broad ridge in the lee of an overhang, and settled close to the mountainside itself, and he slept almost at once – but not easily. All night he tossed and turned and burrowed against her, wrestling his own demons. The gunslinger lay awake for some time, and thought of the footprint, and Jake’s wide eyes in seeing it. How, she wondered, would he cope when it came to seeing the man himself? How would she?

It was a week more before they found out.

 

**VII**

They were perhaps halfway through the mountains now, and the going was beginning to get more difficult. Above them, the peaks buttressed outward in steps and skeins of rock, in ledges that loomed overhead and gave the gunslinger an unsettling kind of reverse vertigo. Her hands were beginning to ache with numbness, scraped and scratched from the climbing, which was all the harder for the cold which began to creep into every waking moment. The ferocious heat of the desert had begun to look almost dream-like. Almost pleasant, in retrospect.

Just as she was beginning to wonder how much further they could possibly go before one of them made a fatal error, they began to descend again, down a narrow zig-zagging path that led them to the floor of a deep cut between mountains. At the bottom, an ice-rimmed stream thundered down from some even higher peak, rushing with a power beyond anything human the gunslinger had seen, the raw strength of nature.

She stopped at the bank of the stream to wash her face. The water was so cold it burned, prickling on her skin, making her head ache with the chill of it. Even so, it was good.

Jake hung back a little way, and when she looked back, he had his arms wrapped around himself. “I can smell him,” he murmured, and looked abashed, as if he knew that was a crazy thing to say.

Susan nodded, straightening up. “I know,” she said, in the same low voice he had spoken in. “I smell him too.”

They went on, following the stream. Above them, the mountains raised their greatest defence: a vast granite wall that climbed, sheer and featureless, into the clouds and beyond. A dead end. Dead in more ways than one, perhaps, Susan thought, not without a dry twist of amusement. It was hard to gauge the distance: the size of the mountain and the cold, clear air had a magnifying effect, so that whatever the distance, it seemed close enough to touch.

For the first time in weeks, Susan felt that rush of excitement, of closeness. There was a sense that the end, too, was close enough to touch – that her answers lay just over the next ridge or around the next corner. It was all she could do not to break into a run. It was not the first time in her long travels that she had been sure that it was almost over, but that did nothing to quell the flare of hope. She lengthened her stride a little.

“Wait!” Jake had stopped dead, near where the stream curved around a huge boulder. He was trembling. His face, in the long shadow of the mountains, was pale as the frost that lingered at the edges of the water.

She slowed, stopped, looked at him long and hard. “What’s wrong?”

He looked sick, oddly grey. “Let’s go back.” There were tears in his eyes. “Please. Let’s go back now.”

Susan looked down at him, the child, her Isaac. Her face was stone.

“ _Please_!” His voice rose to a high wail, almost lost in the wind that was whistling between the canyon walls overhead. They could still hear the thunder here, and the sky above was steel-grey and unyielding. So were the gunslinger’s eyes. She shook her head.

“Thee knows there’s no going back.” It was low, but it was certain. She did not yield, and when he raised his fists as if to strike her, she simply stepped back out of his range. Her face, with its hard edges and ungentle planes, might have been cut from the same granite as the mountains themselves.

Jake looked up at that face, and a kind of wonder dawned. It was not the wonder she had seen in him when they first met, when he had said she was something from a story, but it was a wonder nonetheless. “You’re going to kill me. He killed me the first time, and you’re going to kill me this time. And _I think you know it!_ ”

Susan did not deny it. She could not. Some lies were too big to bear, even for her. Instead, she shook her head and met his eyes. His were liquid, blue, desperate. Her own eyes were flint.

“Go back, or come on,” she said, as she would say again later. “There’s food and water back over the pass, if you make it. There’s enough there to scratch out a life. For my part, I’m going on. With you or without.”

He looked up at her, grey-faced and trembling, with a _knowing_ that cut to her heart, although she refused to feel it. He said nothing more, but glanced back the way they had come, the spider’s path zig-zagging up the black stone of the mountainside. Then, slowly, reluctantly, he put out his hand to her.

She took it, and they walked around the bend in the canyon that way, hand-in-hand. On the other side there was the final thunderous wall of granite, and, perched halfway up it, the man in black. He stood as if waiting for them, no more than twenty feet above. Beside him, a waterfall fed the stream, crashing and rushing from a dark, ragged hole in the stone.

The man in black held a staff in one hand; the other was raised as if in greeting or benediction. He looked the part of the prophet, which no doubt amused him, as many things did: the wind caught his black robe and made it flutter like a flag, and he held his arm high like Moses making some proclamation.

“Gunslinger!” His voice boomed and echoed on the cliffside. “How well you fulfil your prophecy! Good day, and good day, and good day!”

Her guns were in her hands, her hands raised. In the narrow cut of stone, they were deafening. She fired three times, and missed three times, sending puffs of dust up on either side of his head and from the stone beneath his feet. Beside her – behind her, now – Jake cowered, made a child again in this thunderstorm of prophecy and gunfire, clutching at the back of her shirt as if grasping for salvation.

The man in black laughed, full and hearty and jolly. “Would you kill all your answers so easily?”

“Only yours,” Susan muttered darkly, but she holstered her guns. Raising her hands and her voice together, she called up to him, “Come down! No weapons, and no killing. Only palaver, I beg ‘ee. Come down, Broadcloak!”

“Broadcloak?” He tittered. “There’s a name I’ve not heard in some time. Oh, gunslinger, you never could let go, could you? Don’t fret, that lesson’s a-coming.”

“Come down!” she repeated, louder now, through gritted teeth. Her hands itched for her guns. With an effort, she held them still. “I swear on my father’s name, you’ll not be hurt till you’ve given your answers.”

“Ah, there’s the rub.” This laugh, like the first, was a huge and expansive thing; it echoed and thundered until all the mountain range seemed to laugh with him. “It’s not your bullets I fear, Susie. It’s your idea of answers that scares me.”

“Come down.” Her voice was lower now, flatter. It ought not to have carried, but it did.

He shook his head. “No.” He seemed more subdued himself now, although he still smiled, a smirk like a gash of teeth in his white face. “No, we’ll speak on the other side, I think. On the other side we’ll hold much council and long palaver.” His eyes flicked down to Jake, who whimpered low in his throat and shrank away. With some satisfaction, and great deliberateness, the man in black added clearly, “Just the two of us.”

And then he was gone, his cloak swirling like a batwing as he turned and vanished into that cave from which the falls spewed hard and foam-white. Susan’s hand twitched towards her gun, but she held it. _Would you kill all your answers so easily_?

Twelve years since she had last had a glimpse of him. She was changed, but he was not. He was not changed from her girlhood, either. He would never change, until he was ended – and she would end him, one way or the other. Perhaps not in this hollow, howling place of wind and stone and water, perhaps not even on the other side of these mountains, but in time, she would kill him. Not because _ka_ demanded it, although it did, and not because he deserved it, although he did, but because it was all that was left to be done to close the sorry story.

“Come on,” she said to Jake, who was trembling like a tree in a storm. He looked up and shook his head mutely, his eyes closing tight.

“Come on,” she said, patiently, again. “Go back, or come on.”

Jake smiled a hard, unyielding smile – his father’s smile, had he but known it. “And I’ll be fine going back, won’t I? Without a gun or a rope or anything else. I’ll stroll back down the mountain and there’ll be someone waiting with a round of sandwiches and a Thermos of coffee to take the chill off. Do you say so?”

“I say make your choice,” the gunslinger said, stolidly, and she left him there, moved to the hard stone face of the mountain, and began to climb.

After a time, Jake followed.


	6. Under The Stones

**Chapter 6 – Under the Stones**

**I**

The silence thickened along with the darkness. What was there to say? She would not ask for forgiveness, and he would not offer it, and both of them had made their peace with that, if any peace were possible. Susan did not look back as they walked, but the boy did, and saw that ragged piece of sky where they had come through shrink and dim.

So the sun faded behind them to evening, to twilight, and then to a glimmer of pink evening light in the distance, like a moon without stars. The darkness around them was a living thing, thick and solid. The gunslinger lit a torch and held it high, and went on walking.

They had been walking for a long time – hours, though neither of them could be sure how many hours – when she began to speak. It was low and steady, as it might be from a woman talking in her sleep.

“When I was a girl, I used to love the Reaping,” she said, and the cadence of her voice was meditative, the torch in her hand unwavering. “Every year, our town held a Reaptide festival. We weren’t rich, but everything anyone had, it was brought out for Reaptide. I had a new dress at New Earth, every year, and I’d let it down for Reaping – I was still growing then, and it was always an inch or two short by the turn of the year. We’d ride into town, me and my da, and there’d be… there were lanterns, and sweetmeats, and dancing, and plenty of kissing for the older boys and girls. And my da would lift me up on his shoulders to watch the Reaptide fire, down Main Street, and then we’d eat baked potatoes, hot out of the fire, so hot they’d scald your fingers.

“Those were good days. They were hard sometimes, but they were good days. There were spark-lights then, in a few places in town, in the Mayor’s house and the Gathering Hall, and they’d light all of them, just for a few hours. They looked like… like stars, brought down to the earth.” She looked wistful, almost young for a moment in the unreliable light of her torch’s flame.

Jake said nothing. In the distance, there was the sound of dripping water.

“It was light, you see. When I was a girl, I thought that was all the light there ever was in the world.” She laughed, as if at her own foolishness, as if it could erase the years between. “I thought that right up to when I fell in love, and I found out there was more light and more dark in me than there was in any Reaping-night.

“But the truth was, I used to wish I could go back. Even knowing everything, I used to wish I could just… wake up and it would be Reaping-Day, and my da would be waiting to help me with my hair, and we’d ride down to Main Street together and see the fire and the lights at the Gathering Hall. And I could stop everything there, mayhap, stop it with me sitting on my da’s shoulders and chewing on honey-cake, and there’d be the world as it should be, and it would never move on.

“The world always moves on, Jake.”

For the first time since they had entered the cave, she looked at him, and they both understood that she was trying to explain something that she had no words for. And they both understood, in that moment, that she was failing.

She still tried, tried to recapture the dream and the lesson, tried to find the value in that lesson again.

“I never took Patrick to the Reaping,” she said, but her voice no longer had that dreaming quality. Now, it was quieter, less certain, less wistful. “It was too much for me. Jamie took him, once, when there were still Reaping-fires in New Canaan, and he came home asking why I never took him, why couldn’t I show him the lights like Jamie did? And I… It was in the past, do you understand, Jake? It was all the past. And I was there in the present, I was… I was trying to prove myself, to be the first woman who ever bore these guns and the first woman who ever stood on the front line, and I was trying to protect him. That was all I ever wanted.”

Jake was silent. It was not a kind silence.

“I could have sworn I’d protect you,” Susan said, and there was a despair there, but it was a _resigned_ despair, a despair that had already plumbed the depths of itself and come up dry. “Would you have believed me?”

“No.” It was the first thing he had said in hours, now.

“No,” she repeated, quietly, and strode on, into the darkness. “No, nor would I.”

 

**II**

They camped that night, or perhaps by then it was day, in silence. Susan smoked, and stared at the shadows that the fire cast, shifting and dancing on the wet rock around them and above them. Behind her, Jake ate and drank, and lay down to sleep.

Susan went on staring at the shadows. They had danced just so on the walls of Eyebolt Canyon, she remembered, that last and greatest Reaping-fire. They changed their shape, swooped and dove. Once, her father had told her that there were birds in the shadows, if you looked; bright birds and dark ones, swooping and diving, waiting to sing. She’d never gotten the hang of seeing them, not like he had. She only saw the darkness, moving and grasping.

Once, she had told Alain this, in the long hard nights after they had left her hometown. He had been willing to speak to her, and she had needed to speak, just as she had needed to speak to Jake: to frame her case, to defend herself. Or perhaps, to condemn herself. She had told Alain about the birds, and he had looked at her for a long time, poor kind Alain with his slow, gentle way, whose mind was the sharpest of all of them. He hadn’t said anything, but she had felt better, somehow. She had felt _heard_.

She felt nothing of it now. Poor, kind Alain was dead, and whose bullet had it been that struck him down? They were all dead, every one. Cuthbert, torn always between hate and love for her, who had made her laugh and cry in equal measure. Roland, her only love, buried under a stone on the Drop, the last true burial in Mejis. Brave Jamie, who had never understood what passed between the four of them, never thought well of her, but had taken her son to the Reaping-fire because no boy should live all his life without small joys. Thomas DeCurry, Aileen Ritter, Steven Deschain, and Patrick. Always, Patrick.

Susan Deschain did not often cry, and she did not cry now. But she could taste the bitterness, and it was sharper than tears would have been. _How it comes around, and around_ , she thought, and clenched her fist until the nails bit into her palm. _Ka is a wheel, as they say. Ka is a wheel, and who’s to stop it turning?_

She watched the shadows, which were not birds, until her cigarette burned down to the butt and the fire died to the coals. Then she lay down, stretching her long legs out between the rough stones, and slept.

When her breathing had lengthened to steady, quiet waves, Jake opened his eyes. He did not move. If he moved, she would wake. He looked at her across the fire, looked at her with sickness and grief and love. He looked at her until the fire had died down to nothing, until the soft wings of darkness closed around them both, and then he closed his eyes, and he slept, too.

 

**III**

The desert had been trackless. This place was timeless. The darkness was complete and unbroken, and even the gunslinger’s sense of time was long since lost. Days might have been hours, or moments, or years, and a second could have drawn out to a week. They walked when they could walk, and rested when they needed to rest; ate when they were hungry, and drank from the ever-present stream when they thirsted. The water was bitter and mineral-tasting, but it was plentiful. All there was to do was hope that there was nothing in it that would kill them.

Susan was sure it would not. That wasn’t the way this story ended. This wasn’t the way the man in black would have written it. So she drank without any great fear, although she had thought more than once that she saw something in the stream, a kind of corpse-light glowing under the surface. Probably it was just her eyes, trying to bring some light to this lightless place, but even so, she was wary in letting the boy too near the water.

By the water there was a path, a real path, worn smooth into the rock by who could say how many feet or wheels. It was a blessing, because it made their going easier, and it was a curse for the same reason. It had been well-carved once. At regular intervals, there were delicately-shaped, curved pylons cut out of the stone, arching over the path – tethering places, perhaps, for horses or cattle or whatever beasts of burden those long-ago travellers had used. At each, a steel cage held an electric spark-light, but if there had ever been life in those lamps, it was long gone now; they did not light and would never light again, most likely, until the world came around again. Susan tried to pry one of these cages out of the wall, to replace the spark-light with a handful of cloth and tinder and make a better lantern, but after a few minutes of grunting and heaving, she gave up the attempt. They were becoming good at walking in the dark.

They stopped to sleep once by one of those pylons. The next time, it was at a place where the rushing augur of water had started to eat away at the path, and after Jake almost fell – she caught him by the collar just as he pitched over the edge, and thanked any God that might be listening for her own quick reflexes – they backtracked a way, and camped there, to rest before re-approaching that treacherous stretch.

The third time they rested, Jake wandered away a little. The gunslinger sat on her haunches and listened to the skitter of pebbles with a close ear, wary of any sounds that might mark another fall. None came, but all of a sudden, Jake cried out in surprise.

Not fear, though, she realised even as she leaped to her feet. If anything, he sounded happy.

“What is it?” She didn’t _call_ it, exactly. Something about the darkness and echoing silence had dampened her voice over the intervening days (if they were days) – it seemed wrong to shout in this place, like swearing in a cathedral.

“I’m not sure.” A pause. She craned uselessly into the velvety darkness, but couldn’t see him. “I think… I think it’s a railroad?”

Susan followed him, slow and cautious, feeling each place with her boot before putting her weight down. She held herself low and crouched, one hand fumbling at the ground. Her foot struck something hard, and she stopped dead, probing with the toe of her boot.

“Here.” His hand fumbled over her face, and she knelt, fumbling for his shoulder. He was good in the dark, better than she was by a long shot; he seemed able to draw light from nowhere, and when she struck a spark, she saw that his pupils were so dilated that they seemed to have drunk all the blueness out of his eyes.

She struck another spark. They were careful of lights, lately, since the fuel had begun to run out, but both of them had found that their thirst for light was greater than their thirst for water had been even in the desert; it was hard to resist the urge to strike flint more often, for even that momentary glimpse of the subterranean world they were lost in.

It could be a railway, she saw. The place Jake had found ended in a smooth, curved wall, and set into the wall were long cables, dotted with black nodes through which electricity might pass. On the ground were the rails, set only a few inches above the raw stone; it was one of these that she had stubbed her foot against, she realised. It could be a railway, indeed. In fact, she struggled to think what else it might be.

“We’ll follow it in the morning,” she said, at last. It was an oddly quaint thing to hear in her own voice, as if there was any hope of a morning down here. She reached for Jake’s hand, and extinguished the light.

How long she slept, she could not have said, but when she woke, Jake was already up and waiting, sitting on one of the rails and watching her sightlessly, a faint whisper of a shape in the endless, clinging dark. They walked like blind men down the railroad, shuffling the sides of their feet always against one rail, one hand coming up now and then to brush the smooth, damp surface of the wall, as if to check that there was still solidity around them, and that they were not just floating in some endless nothingness, as it felt. The going was slow, but not hard; whoever had cut this tunnel had done so with skill and luck, and however many centuries later, it still stood remarkably firm.

They rested at last, and for the first time since entering the cave, they spoke again. They were settled with their backs against the wall, sharing a few pieces of jerky, and Jake said suddenly, “How did you do it?”

“Hm?”

“Prove yourself. You said a while ago, about…”

In the darkness, she smiled faintly, not without a touch of bitterness. “Over a long time. Years. Some’d say I didn’t, even now. Boys don’t like it when girls do better than them.”

She heard, rather than saw, the face he pulled, the distaste at the idea. It made her smirk a little, because wasn’t that just it? “But you must’ve. I mean, really, once and for all. They gave you the guns.”

“Aye. Aye, they did.” She touched the handles of the guns in question, traced again that smooth sandalwood grip. There was a reflectiveness to the motion, as if she could draw herself back through their touch. “There was only one way. Win the way every gunslinger had won, and win better. I had to fight my teacher, and win. It sounds simple, only…” She trailed off, and although she couldn’t see him, she looked at him nonetheless, stared into the blackness as if she could pierce it with just force of will. “Why do you want to know?”

He was quiet for a moment. At last, he said evasively, “I want to know how grown-up get that way. I bet it’s all bullshit,” he added, with some vehemence.

“You want to know what you’d have to do to prove yourself,” she said, and there was a hint of a smile in her voice. A hint almost of admiration.

Jake was quiet for a long time. Perhaps he nodded. In the darkness, it was impossible to tell. At last, reluctantly, he said “Yeah. I guess so, yeah.”

“You can’t do that.” It was an absolute, a closing of the prospect. “You’d kill me, or I’d kill you. Either way, one of us would be left neck-deep in the shit.”

Jake muttered something under his breath, something that sounded awfully like _You’re going to kill me anyway_. She couldn’t argue with that, so she didn’t – just waited. Waited without expectation.

“I still want to hear,” he said at last, as she lit her cigarette. “Please?”

Susan smiled a little, and by the glow of her cigarette, Jake could actually see it. “I had to fight my teacher, and win. Only I didn’t exactly have a teacher…”

 

**IV**

When she came to Gilead, the great and ancient city at the heart of New Canaan, there was something of a lack of teachers. Or, more accurately, there was one, who took one look at her – her long golden hair, her soft face, the bulge of a baby under her loose shirt – and told her in no uncertain terms that there was no place for her on the shooting fields. He treated her with a kind of detached respect, as befitted the mother of his lord’s grandson, but he made himself clear. Go to the Back Court, his face had said, and play at Points with the other ladies, or better yet, go nowhere near the courts at all.

Cort, she remembered, had been his name, and the boys had viewed him with a kind of awe. Even Cuthbert, who was insolent above all things and who viewed Cort with a dull and distant hate – even he had tinged that hate with worship. But Susan, who had been raised among big men with hard ideas, looked at Cort and saw nothing but an aging man past his prime, clinging to the scraps of a world that had long moved on. He still saw his gunslingers as knights, she realised, the first time she laid eyes on him, and himself as the father of heroes, as though it were still those shining days of Arthur Eld, and everything still followed an order and a pattern. But the world had moved on, and she had no desire to be a knight. Only to be a soldier. Only to be able to protect what was hers, as she had done in Mejis.

She did not approach him again after that first time. Alain did, once, and came back quietly abashed and clearly shamed. Cuthbert refused to take any part in it, and she would never have asked. She would never have asked anything of him. She had killed his best friend, closer to him than a brother, and that stood between them for all their lives. He would protect her and stand fast for her, but she had a sense that it was for the child in her belly, and not for Susan herself.

There were a thousand reasons that she should never have been allowed to bear a gun. Besides her sex, she was too old – at sixteen, a good decade older than a gunslinger ought to be ‘prenticed – and too low-born, not educated in the High Speech or born to the court and the Affiliation. There was only one reason in her favour, but Alain and Cuthbert, who had seen her at Mejis jail and at Eyebolt Canyon, knew it well: Susan Delgado was a gunslinger born, and there was no changing that.

So it was Alain and Cuthbert who taught her, and it was a mish-mashed kind of teaching. They were still only boys themselves, neither of them having taken their own tests of manhood, and they were deeply meshed in their own grief, but they taught her nonetheless, and the rest she learned from watching from the Back Court, watching the boys with their falcons and staves and pistols as she nursed Patrick at her breast.

She was nineteen ( _nineteen_ , the grown gunslinger thought, with a shudder she could not and would not explain to Jake), and the war that would destroy Gilead was drawing ever closer, when her patience ran out. She was Susan Deschain then, named for a marriage that had never happened, the better to stake her son’s claim. She was growing wise to the ways of the Inner Baronies, to their formalities and hierarchies and the delicate balance of power at court. She was growing wise to something else, too: the ever-present shadow of Steven Deschain’s advisor, his black robes and his white face and his too-cold smile, doting on the boy as he doted on his master’s wife. Marten Broadcloak, they called him, and something in his eyes, she recognised, and something in his smile was mocking. He made comments from the side of his mouth that hinted at more knowledge than he ought to have had, and when he thought she wasn’t looking, he looked at her with a vicious hate that she could not even wonder at.

Not so did he look at Patrick, her son, last of the line of Eld. He doted on the boy, and was inescapable: the boy in return answered his affection, gleeful and fascinated by the pale man with his magic tricks and little jokes. Patrick was toddling then, small and fair, still baby-chubby and with his father’s ice-blue eyes, and every time Susan saw him, she felt such a surge of desperate, protective love that she felt it must burn her away from the outside in.

She left him with his grandfather, lied that she had to rest, and then she called Alain and Cuthbert to her and they held a long palaver all that night, in murmurs and half-spoken truths shared between them.

Cuthbert was seventeen then, and well past his own test of manhood. He was a handsome man, tall and strong now, and as she had thought when they first met, sometimes she thought _If things were otherwise…_ But she had killed Roland, and she thought that for all those three years, that was all he saw when he looked at her. Roland’s killer, the mother of his child. But he sat with her that night, and at the end of it, it was he who suggested what they must do.

 

**V**

She left the story there for the night. There was good reason for it: she was starting to weary herself, and although Jake was listening raptly, she heard him stifling yawns more than once. Stories could wait. Sleep could not.

The next morning, as they settled themselves back on the railroad with that one-foot-to-the-rail shuffle, Jake said, “What happened to Roland?”

The gunslinger stiffened at the question, and she was glad for the darkness that disguised her expression. She did not answer. After a time, Jake seemed to accept that as answer enough.

“Cuthbert, then?” Jake began to say, and then something in the darkness caught them. Not something attacking, although that was Susan’s first wild thought, but something solid that she had collided with, hard. It was at chest-height on her, and winded her for a moment. Jake was less lucky; it struck him in the forehead, and he went down with a cry.

She made a light immediately, and leant over him. “Are you hurt?” It sounded scolding, harsh, and she regretted her tone at once.

Jake, for his part, barely seemed to notice the tone. “I’m fine,” he said, dazedly, and stumbled to his feet with one hand to his forehead, shaking his head briskly to make sure he’d told the truth. She saw no blood, but in this poor light, it would have been hard to tell in any case.

They turned to see what they had run into. It was a flat sheet of metal, sitting squatly and complacently on the tracks, and resting on that, a complex interweave of cogs and gears, and a big seesaw lever in the middle.

“Handcar,” Jake said, still in that dazed voice.

“What?”

“It’s a handcar.” No longer dazed; now he just sounded impatient. “Like in the old cartoons. Look.” And he scrambled up onto the metal plate, grasped the handle with both hands, and by putting all his weight behind it, managed to shove the lever down. Silently, gracefully, the handcar glided a foot or so along the rail.

“Good!” said a mechanical voice from deep in the mechanism, making them both jump. “Good, push ag…”

It faded out, and Jake looked a little sheepish. “It works a little hard,” he said, defensively.

Susan brushed off his tone, vaulting up onto the plate beside him. He wasn’t wrong – the lever was stiff, but it moved under her firm push, and they slid a little further forward. She felt a driveshaft work under the plate, where she stood.

“Good, push again!” said the handcar, cheerfully. She disliked it at once, but at the same time, she could see the virtue of it. On such a contraption, they could move much faster, and still be sure of sticking to their path. She hated it all the more for that.

“Neat, huh?” said Jake, and in his voice she could hear that he loathed it too. “You stand on one side, I’ll stand on the other. You push, then I’ll push. Only you’ll have to do the pushing first, until it gets rolling.”

“I got it.” No doubt in her voice. A lot in her mind. Susan took up position, closed her fists around the cold metal bar, and closed her eyes for a moment. “I’ll push.”

And she did. The voice called out its inane encouragement – _Good, push again! Good, push again!_ – until on the third or fourth time around, she fumbled up the crossbar and found the button she had been hoping for. She pressed it – _push_ that _again, you damned machine!_ – and the voice chirped up “Goodbye, pal!” and then fell into blissful silence.

Then there was just silence, and darkness, and the steady labour of the pump. Push. Push. Push. Something in the mechanism creaked, and then was silent, as the rust of ages wore off. They moved through the darkness, faster now. Sometimes, the boy helped. Mostly, Susan pumped alone, heaving with the effort, sweat trickling down her back. She had always been pleased by hard work, in an obscure sort of way. This was mindless: it required no planning and no thought, and she lost herself in the rhythm of It, in the steady rise and fall.

It was, however, very hard work. The unseen track rose on a gentle upwards slope now, just steep enough to make driving the cart a trial. The mechanical voice spoke up once, some hours later, to suggest they eat Crisp-A-La, and again to tell them that nothing satisfied at the end of a hard day like Larchies. Susan grunted in response to both of these proclamations, and did not break her stride.

When at last they did stop, she slept almost at once, and slept like the dead. Jake sat back on his haunches and watched her, in the darkness, watched her without seeing her.

They went on this way for two more rest-sleeps (the idea of a day had long become nonsensical), and all the time, Susan felt an apprehension, or a longing, growing in her chest, a vicious excitement at the knowledge that with every pump of the handcar’s lever, the end drew closer. She worked until she slept, and she slept like the dead. It was not until after those two rests that Jake found the time to say, almost timidly: “What happened with Cuthbert? With the trial? How did it end?”

_How did it end_? Wasn’t that a question for the ages? Susan bit back the urge to answer _It ends when we get to the other side of the mountain,_ but that was foolishness. It was what he had asked, but not what he had meant. So close to their shared doom, she owed him more.

They settled and ate the last of their food (neither of them acknowledged this; it no longer seemed important), and then Susan rolled a cigarette, and she let her mind fall back, away from the ache of her body and the thunder of her blood in her veins. Back to that day on the fields of Gilead, when her world had truly moved on.

 

**VI**

“Cort!” Cuthbert had been a full-fledged gunslinger now for some years. He could have sent word delicately, could at least have knocked on his old teacher’s door, but even through all the grief and hardness that the years had brought him, there was still a part of him that would always delight in mischief. That was the only explanation for why he slammed his way into the home of a man who could have killed him in his prime, without any charm or finesse. “Bondsman! I want you!”

Cort was a squat, bow-legged man. He had always been ugly, but the worst of it had been dealt by the boy Roland, before Susan had ever laid eyes on him; in his own test, Roland – or rather, Roland’s hawk - had succeeded in tearing out his eye and carving his arm to mincemeat. He was a shadow of himself since, but a shadow with a strong right fist, and one who could still tower over Cuthbert Allgood with all the echoes of a childhood’s harsh lessons. He limped out to face the intruder, meaty hands gripped into fists at his sides.

Cuthbert, a gunslinger and a grown man, did not quail at the sight of him. He was a man who was best drawn to action by anger, and there was a great pool of it stored in him, much of it long-lying and long aimed at Cort himself. He smiled indolently at his former teacher, rocking back on his heels. “You’re wanted,” he said casually. “On the small fields.”

Cort’s ruined face twisted suspiciously. “Wanted for what?”

“Call it a challenge.” Cuthbert’s smile was blithe, but there was a cold hardness behind it. “My challenge, Cort.”

“Your challenge is three years gone, gunslinger.” Cort shook his head, almost mournfully, and turned back to his bedroom. “I’m old, and tired, and I will take my leave. Whatever your jest is, play it with another partner.”

“No jest.” For once, there was no laughter in Cuthbert’s voice, and he spoke the High Speech. Slowly, with deliberate theatricality, he unbuckled his gunbelt – the guns he had won three years prior, the guns he had borne to battle many times now – and laid it to one side, on Cort’s little table. Cort looked at it, and slowly, painfully slowly, he turned back to Cuthbert, who now regarded him with uncharacteristic gravity. “No jest, bondsman. My guns were won in battle, as thou knowest. A true gunslinger wins them thus: by challenge on the field, by besting his teacher. Will you come with me to the fields?”

Cort looked down at the young man, and deep down, perhaps he wondered at it. Perhaps he doubted Cuthbert, who had been a joker all his life, whose mocking extended to everyone and most of all to himself; perhaps he doubted himself, for as he had said, he was old and tired. Whatever lay behind his scarred and clouded visage, whatever caused his hesitation, in the end, he nodded.

“You know that loss means exile?” There was a sorrow almost in his voice. For all the ill-will that lingered between them, there was a bond, too. “Even for such as you, Cuthbert son of Robert, for all you bear those guns. You have little to gain, and all to lose. Cry off, gunslinger. It is not yet too late.”

Cuthbert’s lips thinned, and his eyes turned downwards for a moment. He knew, all right. Nobody who had lived in Gilead could not know it. To lose was to be cast out and sent west, exiled and disgraced. To lose would be to cleave oneself from friends and family and home, and wander: to leave behind everything and everyone.

“It is too late,” he said, quietly, still in the High Speech, and looked up with clear eyes. “I know the terms, Cort. Do you take the challenge?”

“Two hours,” Cort said, and his tone had changed. No pity and no grief now, only business. “The weapon of your choice.”

Cuthbert nodded then, and smiled thin and hard. As he left the teacher’s hut, he snatched up his gunbelt from the table, but did not buckle it back to his hips. He came to the hut a man, and left a boy, just as he had said he would.

 

**VII**

When Cort came to the field, and found the two of them standing there, it was clear from his face that he did not understand. He had expected Cuthbert alone, but Susan stood beside him, and in her hands she held a long stave. Her long hair was braided into a bun on the top of her head, and she wore boy’s clothes, her breasts bound.

It was not only Cuthbert and Susan there, of course. Word in the castle spread like blood on a cloth, and there was Alain standing behind them, there at the sidelines were Jamie and Thomas and all the others, gunslingers and gunslingers-to-be, ladies and servants and merchants and maids, spread out to make the field an arena. But Susan was not on the sidelines. She stood a little ahead of Cuthbert, and in both their faces was mirrored a hard determination.

Cort stopped halfway across the field, and stood there, staring them down. Muscle shifted under the hardened ruin of his face. “What is this?” he demanded, and his gaze bypassed Susan entirely, fixed Cuthbert with the full force of the old teacher’s rage.

Still, it was Susan who answered. “If I had called you to the field, would you have come?”

“No.” He did not hesitate. His working eye barely flickered to her for a moment, before it went back to Cuthbert, glaring with the fury of a betrayal. “Nor will I be part of this now.”

“Then if I challenge you, if I call you to test me, you will not answer?”

“I will answer as I did before.” He sighed, and there was not only anger in him, but a deep pity, an unwillingness that was neither hidden nor pretended. His look turned to her now, and his voice gentled a little. “You are not a gunslinger, Susan Deschain. If we fought, I would kill you, and would you have me do that? Kill you, and leave your boy an orphan? Go back to your child, girl. Be by his side. Be what he needs – a mother, not a gunslinger.”

There was a great deal she would have liked to say to that. Chief among them, that in such turbulent times, a mother would not be enough, could not be enough, for any child. She was mother and father both to Patrick, and so it would always be, and so it must always be, for his true father lay under the stones of Eyebolt Canyon, a hundred miles or more from here, in the cove of the Clean Sea.

She did not say that. Instead, she raised her chin and spoke the words of the High Speech that Cuthbert and Alain had taught her and coached her through. “Teacher, I have come with a serious purpose.”

Anguish showed on his face. “I am not your teacher, woman.”

“I have come as an outcast from my husband’s house,” she went on, resolute, as if he had not spoken. Her gaze did not waver. “I have come in the name of my father, who was Patrick Delgado of Mejis, and in the name of my husband, who was Roland Deschain son of Steven, and in the name of my son, Patrick Deschain son of Roland. I have come exiled, and knowing the cost of failure. I have come with my chosen weapon. Bondsman, teacher, face me.”

“No.” Cort carried his own weapon, a huge and scarred old staff that had felled more hopeful students than anyone could count. He dropped it now, and his face was hard. Anger pulsed beneath his skin, in the vein of his forehead, but he did not shout. He did not have to. The flat negation of his voice was more enraged than any yell could have been.

Susan had expected this, had thought she had accepted it. But now she found that she was trembling with her own rage, and close to tears despite herself. Her hands tightened on the staff she held until her knuckles were white, until she feared she might never loosen it again.

Quietly, Cuthbert stepped up beside her, and his hand settled for a moment on her shoulder, clasping her arm. Understanding.

“It was worth a try,” he said, and his tone was almost cheery. There was flint in his eyes, though, as he looked at Cort. “A very good laugh. Very interesting. Now, shall we get back to what we agreed to?”

“To your challenge?” Cort laughed, low and bitter, and bent to retrieve his stick. “Maggot, you should have been sent west before you ever came to this field. Now you want to stand there, without even your weapon, after this shitshow, and fight me? I knew you were soft in the head, Cuthbert Allgood, and ever too much the fool, but even from you I did not expect so much stupidity.”

“I’m constantly surprising,” Cuthbert agreed, smiling a wide, hard smile that showed all his teeth. “One of my best traits. Will you fight me, teacher, or do you yield?”

“Yield?” Cort snorted, leaning a little on his stick. “After today, maggot, it will be my pleasure to beat you to a pulp and see you limp west, weeping. Have you come with a serious purpose?” Back to the High Speech, to the old words, but with nothing of respect in it. He said it quickly, as if it were itself a trial to be gotten through before the real work began.

“I have come with a serious purpose.” Cuthbert’s smile, hard and dangerous, did not falter.

Cort scoffed at the sight of it, disgust in his face. “Have you come as an exile from your father’s house?”

Cuthbert’s smile faded then, and he glanced over his shoulder, to where his mother stood and watched in clear horror and shame; to his father’s comrades nearby. His father was dead, had died in the fighting some six months ago. Here stood his father’s house, in its totality: himself, and his mother.

He swallowed, and looked back at Cort. The old teacher thought, with some satisfaction, that at last he realised the weight of his foolishness – too late to save him.

“I have so come,” he said, slowly, reluctantly.

Cort hefted his staff, readying himself with a leisurely air. “Have you come with your chosen weapon?” he asked, looking at Cuthbert’s empty hands, and there was a bitter mockery in his voice.

“I have.” Cuthbert tilted his chin a little, and there was that flinty light in his eyes again, a dull spark of the flame that burned deep with in him.

It was then, and only then, that Cort understood. His eyes widened – the seeing eye and the raw scar of an eye both – and his grip shifted on his stave, his jaw shifting under the mass of scars that passed for his face. He had gone pale, and his voice was no longer so loud, or so clear – but ever a man of duty, he said the words nonetheless. “What is your weapon?”

Cuthbert stepped back again, and his hand on Susan’s shoulder was so tight it began to hurt. Both their fates hung in the balance now, and both their families.

“She is.”

 

**VIII**

“I think I get it,” Jake said, slowly. He was sitting on the edge of the handcar, while Susan paused in the telling to dig in her tobacco poke. It was getting quite empty, she realised, and that concerned her more than the scarcity of food. She was unsure how long they had been here, how long she had been telling the story. Long enough that she was beginning to get tired. Long enough that they ought to be back on their way.

But Jake had been listening all this time, and she could hardly even hear his breathing, so deep was his listening silence. “It’s a good story, I guess,” he said now, and sounded almost reluctant in saying it. “I mean, it’s got everything, right? Twists and turns and Cuthbert caring about you all along. And…”

“The story’s not over.” She cut him off, quiet and flat.

“I mean… you fought him, right?” Jake settled forwards, his elbows on his knees; she could hear the handcar shift with the motion. “The teacher, Cort. You can tell me how you fought him, how you won. I’d like to hear it. But you already did the really interesting bit, how you got him to take the challenge. That’s the point, right?”

“He didn’t take the challenge.”

“What?”

“He didn’t take it.” The light of her cigarette trembled a little, clasped between her lips. “He knelt, and he yielded to Cuthbert. He’d rather yield to a man who’d shamed him so than fight me. I could have killed him.”

 

**IX**

_Could have killed him_ was putting it mildly. For a long moment after Cort dropped to one knee and offered his submission, she could hardly even see for the rage that blinded her, and the shame, and the disappointment. The world shimmered and blazed with fury, and all there was in that moment was her own murderous anger.

Cuthbert stared down at Cort in disbelief. Now, for the first time since this whole charade had begun, now his face registered real horror. He had been ready to place his life in Susan’s hands, had been ready to back her through this mad endeavour, had even been ready to go into the west with her if she had lost.

He had not been ready for a surrender. He raised his hands, palm-first, his eyes wide and his mouth slack, as if to ward off the sight of Cort kneeling before him. He looked _sick_ , as if he’d been punched in the chest.

“I…” Words failed him. He looked hopelessly back at Susan, and at Alain, who was staring thin-lipped and trembling at the scene.

“Take my surrender, boy.” Cort’s voice was low and vehement, and he did not raise his head. “Choose another weapon, or take my surrender, but hurry and choose. I’m too old to kneel here all day.”

Cuthbert’s mouth worked, without sound, without any words to bring to his lips. He raked both hands back through his hair, distraught. This had been his plan, his promise to Susan. He had thought it would work. He had really thought it would. “I…” He wetted his lips, looked around at the crowd that surrounded them, and swallowed hard. For a moment, his eyes held Susan’s, a silent apology, a real grief in his face. “I accept.”

“ _No!_ ” Susan burst free of her paralysis, and she surged forwards towards Cort – no plan in mind, no expectation, only that inability to hold still. There were tears spilling down her face, hot and angry. Alain moved with a speed that belied his bulk, and then he was behind her, arms around her, holding her back as she fought him and spat like a wildcat. The High Speech was forgotten: she spoke in the thick accent of her childhood, rural and unlearned. “No, damn you! Damn you! Face me, asshole! I _command_ you! I _order_ you! I…”

“Order me?” Cort was on his feet again, and his anger rivalled her own. “By what right do you order me? After all this shit, all this embarrassment to your fathers, all this bedamned waste of my time, you _order_ me? In whose fucking name?”

“In the name of her son’s father, bondsman.” A new voice, this, cool and steady amid the chaos of anger. The crowd parted with a kind of sigh, and forwards stepped Marten Broadcloak, smiling indulgently. Patrick, plump and wide-eyed, held his hand. “She has the right.”

And in the moment, she was grateful to him. Marten was an unexpected ally in her fight, and she took a vicious pleasure in the thunderstruck look on Cort’s face. She didn’t see the concern on Alain’s broad countenance as he let her arms drop, or the sidelong glare that Cuthbert cast, mixed resentment and fear. She didn’t even see Marten’s smile, not any longer. All that mattered was the shock and the disgust on Cort’s battered face, and how it faded slowly into resignation.

“Face me,” she said again, and knew that she had won. He did not like Marten, did not trust Marten, there was no law that pressed him to do what Marten said, but Marten had won the argument for her, nonetheless. She could see it in his eyes, that defeat. The fire in her no longer burned so hot or so fierce. “I come here as an exile. Face me, Cort, not as my child’s mother or as your student’s wife, face me as a student. Give me that much credit, at least.”

His jaw worked underneath his skin, and she could see him looking her up and down, judging. She was tall, but not as tall as he was, nor was she broad and heavyset as he was. She could have disappeared in his shadow. It was not an even match, and she could see him silently trying to remind her of it, trying to urge her to a better course. It did not move her. Roland had been fourteen when he had won his guns, she reminded herself; smaller than she was, and weaker, and Cort then had been younger and stronger. Roland had won. So, too, would she.

Cort sighed, heavily, and bent to retrieve his staff.

“So, then.” His voice weighed heavy, but it weighed in the High Speech. “Have you at me, girl?”

“I do.”

“In whose name?”

Susan looked back then at her friends, at Alain and Cuthbert who now stepped away, their faces grim. She looked at Marten Broadcloak, still smiling as if this were all that he had intended for the day. She looked at her son, and saw those blue eyes in his face, blue as ice or as skies over the Drop.

“In my husband’s name,” she said, but she thought _In my own. In my own name, you fucker. Or my father’s name, for he might have been no gunslinger, but he was worth twenty of you_. The rage was beginning to resurface, but it was no longer so hot and wild. Now it was tightened and cooled, diamond-hard. “In the name of Roland Deschain, of the house of Eld.”

Cort nodded, slow, resigned, and stepped back, slowly, to his own side of the swatch of bare earth where they would meet.

“Be swift, then,” he said, and then, in the Low Speech, quietly, “And I am sorry.”

 

**X**

Susan fell silent for a long time, and when she did move, it was only to stand and move back to her place at the handle. “We should keep moving,” she told Jake, and there was no space for disagreement in her tone.

Even so, Jake opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again. _Why bother?_ he thought bitterly. It wasn’t like she’d listen. Grown-ups never did, and Susan was almost worse than other grown-ups. Worse, because sometimes she _would_ listen, and then snatch it away just as you got to want it. She did it, he thought, almost without realising, like it might burn her to be a human being for too long. So why bother?

“I’ll pump for a bit,” he said instead, at last, and got up.

She groped a hand against his shoulder, and he felt rather than saw her shake her head. “I want to,” she told him. Part of him hated her for it. It was another grown-up thing, another _Susan_ thing, to say what she wanted and never think that he might want anything too. But he relented, and went to sit down again. His arms were still aching from the last time he’d driven the handcar, for one thing.

For another thing, she’d said _I want_ , but he had a strange sense she might mean _I need_.

Even so, he couldn’t put aside that resentment. She’d started to tell him something, something that might be important – something that he felt, from how she had broken off and gone quiet, _must_ be important – and then she’d stopped, just because she didn’t feel like it any more. Just like she’d picked him up when she felt like it, and would leave him just as sharply as she’d left off the story. He couldn’t even be angry at her for that, really, because she had never pretended that it would be any other way.

He _was_ angry, though. Sometimes, she came so close to being what people never were – to _understanding_ , and even to caring. He wished, almost, that she could just be an old hag who treated him like a little kid. At least then he would know he was on his own.

The track they travelled on was angling downwards now, back towards the river. Jake could hear it, the subtle splashing of the current in the darkness. The river, and Susan’s laboured breathing, and nothing else. He closed his eyes. It made no difference, in the blackness. He wondered why he had stayed. He wondered where she had gone, inside herself.

After a time, when she finally began to flag, he took up her place at the handle, and let the hard work push away any wondering at all.

 

 

**XI**

They didn’t speak for another day. The silence was not a companionable one. Jake tried to break the weight of it – and maybe to goad the gunslinger – by whistling as he worked the pump, and then singing, little fragments of stupid schoolyard rhymes that were designed to annoy. In the darkness, he couldn’t see whether it had any effect on her at all, but she didn’t tell him to stop.

In the end, he did stop. Part of it was the hard work, and the effort it took to think of anything but pumping. Most of it was the silence. It sucked the insolence and the pettiness out of his whistling, and spat them back into the endless darkness, and somehow, the silence still remained, over the top of any noise he made. He thought that he could have screamed at the top of his lungs, and it would still have been silent.

The track canted up, and then down again, running alongside the river. They stopped, slept. When they woke, she said two words – “Let’s go,” – and then was silent again. He took the first shift this time, and then they changed, and Jake sat hunkered at the front of the handcar, squinting into the darkness and wondering how the journey to your death could be this boring. He had grown used to the darkness, to the way his eyes played tricks on him. He had learned to ignore the flashes at the edge of his vision, learned to ignore those flickers of what might be light. He had learned to ignore the smudges of colour, the smear of sickly green that lingered like witch-light over his eyes, and he went on ignoring it until it was close, _very_ close, and not a smudge at all but a face, horribly inhuman and terribly human, an insect-like smattering of eyes above a flattened nose, and there was a body under the face, slowly emerging from the water scant feet below them, and a hand attached to the body, and the hand had too many fingers and was starting to reach out of the water, and he heard the splash, and he could _smell_ it, faint and wet and rotten.

It turned out that he had been wrong. When he screamed, the silence crashed in like a window in a storm.

He recoiled, scrambling back from the edge of the handcar until his back struck the pillar of its mechanism. The gunslinger grunted, and he felt her hand brush his shoulder for a moment before she redoubled her efforts, speeding up a little, pushing them faster into the darkness. The glowing green face receded, became a smear of witch-light and then nothing at all.

“What…” Jake’s throat seemed to have closed up. He crawled back further, until he was close enough to Susan to feel less alone, less exposed. “What the hell was…?”

He choked himself off there, whimpering low in his throat as the luminescence reappeared ahead of them, coagulated into three figures, naked and misshapen. Susan gritted her teeth – he could see that now, by the dim glow the _things_ gave off – and went on with her steady pumping, the wheels whistling on the track. The three figures watched, unmoving, unblinking, as the handcar passed.

“They’re Slow Mutants.” She spoke in a steady staccato, punctuated by each push of the lever. “I doubt they’ll bother us. Most likely they’re more afeared of us than…”

One of the three figures, a Lovecraftian abomination of tentacles and almost-human eyes, lurched away from the others, towards the handcar. Susan broke off sharply, staring into its idiot face, as if she could stare it into submission. As a boneless hand flapped and slithered onto the flat bed of the handcar, Jake screamed again, short and strangled, and shrank back against Susan’s leg like a frightened dog. It seemed to snap her out of whatever fugue she was in; letting go of the handle, she drew and fired in one smooth movement.

The muzzle flash was unbearably bright, after all those days in total darkness. The acrid smell of gunpowder overtook the mutants’ damp stink, and the faintly glowing form fell back, half its hollow face eclipsed by a black bullet hole. There was no time for triumph, no time to hesitate. The gunslinger’s bony hand closed around Jake’s wrist, pulling him to his feet.

“You’ll have to pump for me, I think,” she said. Despite the firmness of her grip, her voice was surprisingly gentle, like she was soothing a fractious colt. “Can you do that?”

The boy’s eyes bulged almost out of his head. Fear seemed to ooze off him, with an almost physical force, as if it were too much for his frail body to contain. Still, he nodded, and let her guide his hand to the pump. It was only when she let go that he flinched, and whimpered again.

Susan took a deep breath. “Be ready,” she told him, and rested her hand for a moment on his shoulder. Around them, the other Slow Mutants – not only the two who had stood between them and the river, but more besides, crawling and shuffling and scrabbling out of the darkness – was closing in. Not quickly, not close, not yet, but there they were, a faintly-glowing crowd of rubberneckers, not attacking, just… watching. Considering, if such reduced creatures could consider at all. Her fingers tightened a little on Jake’s shoulder. “Slowly,” she cautioned, still in that soothing tone, while her thumb traced the hammer of her revolver. “Don’t wear yourself out.”

They could smell fear, she was sure of that. Most beasts could. But fear alone wouldn’t draw them to attack. Still, she realised, she was afraid – deeply afraid. This was their territory, this darkness, this silent tomb under the mountains; she and the boy were intruders, and far from the light. She was still blinking away the afterimages of her gunshot, and the strange, faint glow of the mutants’ bodies only slurred her vision, made it hard to see clearly. Her eyes, she thought, had forgotten the light.

Beside her, Jake whimpered. Three of the unnatural shapes had begun their assault, a shuffling kind of charge, while with corpse-like, misshapen hands they scrabbled for purchase on the handcar. His movements had stilled, and he stared back at them, his eyes almost as wide and dark as the blind pits of the leader’s face, his breath caught in mid-gasp.

“Keep going,” she said, quietly. The gun was raised, without her thinking about it. She thumbed back the hammer with one hand, and with the other, covered his eyes. “Don’t look at me. Don’t look back. Just keep going.”

Her gun thundered, cordite and smoke filling the close, damp air. One mutant’s chest was stoved in, and it stumbled back, hands thrown up in a burlesque of shock. The boy pumped the handcar once, twice. He was trembling so much he could barely stand. The gunslinger fired again, took the leading mutant in one of those great dark pits of eyes. It seemed to grin as it came forwards, the glow brighter where the skull now pierced the luminescent flesh. Its hands were cold and dead, the fingers melted oddly together as if under a flame. One of those hands lurched out, and closed on Jake’s ankle, pulling hard.

When his chin hit the pallet of the handcar, it made a strangely metallic thud. He began, a moment later, to scream, scrabbling for purchase on the pillar, thrashing like a fish on a line. Other pale, greenish hands were reaching for him now, even as Susan’s gun thundered and cut through the ghoul’s shoulder. The inhuman faces, empty of rage and of feeling, leered and loomed from the darkness, all around the cart. One grabbed the back of Jake’s shirt; another, drooling and making a low, wet mewl in its throat, wrapped both hands around his thigh. The handcar juddered, slowing, stopping. She grabbed for his hand, pulled hard, trying to keep her purchase. The mutants were stronger than she’d expected. Too strong. She could feel her bootheels slide on the slick metal of the handcar’s base. Jake screamed, high and terrified, teetering now on the edge of the handcar as his other hand lost purchase on the pillar.

_This is the end_ , Susan realised, with a horrible clarity. _This is the end that Marten meant him to come to._ She couldn’t shoot this way, holding onto him; the pull was taking her off-balance, and there was no way she could hold her aim. She couldn’t pump, couldn’t move them on. She could only let go, and keep moving. Keep on towards the man in black. Towards her _ka_. Towards the Tower.

“ _Fuck_!” she cried aloud, and let her gun fall, dropping to one knee so she could grab his wrist in both hands. Something clicked in his joint, and he screamed; she ignored it, pulling with all her might. One of her hands scrabbled under his armpit, pulling them tighter together; they teetered on the edge, the gunslinger and the boy and the mutants, and one of those half-fused hands snatched at her, caught her hat and a long lock of hair, and then she gave an almighty yank and they were falling back onto the handcar, pain snapping at her scalp as the hair came away in the Slow Mutant’s grip.

No time to hesitate. No time to feel. She scrabbled desperately for her gun – thank all the gods that ever were, it hadn’t fallen off the car – and found it, managed to fumble her hand around the sandalwood grip and aim, all the while holding the sobbing boy against her. Gunfire lanced through the darkness, took the half-faced creature through the belly. It fell, at last, flat on its face, with a sound almost like a wheeze.

No time for relief, either.

“Hold on to my belt,” she told Jake, raising her voice as she stumbled to her feet, and fired backwards, half-blind, hearing the bullet richochet off the bed of the handcar and a mutant mewl in pain. “Hold on, and close your eyes.”

Jake didn’t question it. He clung to her like a drowning man, buried his face against her side. Summoning all her strength, trying to keep her focus on both the work and the enemy, Susan began to pump the lever, one-handed at first, and then, with the sudden desperate realisation that she couldn’t both pump and shoot, holstered her gun and put all her weight behind it, all her adrenaline and all her fear. She felt a hand close around her ankle; kicked back without thinking and felt her bootheel sink into something too soft and too slick to be bone. Then Jake was stamping on the thing’s wrist, a panicked, wild kind of movement, even as he clung to her, and then she felt it loosen, and they were free. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the half-faced mutant fall onto the tracks, saw its comrades surge over it like a sickly tide. The halt and the lame, the blind and the corpse-like undead… they went on stumbling towards her and the boy, lepers seeking a messiah, Lazarus looking for a miracle.

But they were falling behind, and Susan breathed again. She went on fighting the machine, feeling the muscles in her arms and her back scream and burn, trying to pull any speed she could out of the cart – but the space between them was growing, and she could keep this up a while yet, and they were both safe. They were both alive. They—

“Susan!” Jake’s shriek echoed around the granite walls. It was a moment before she saw what he had spotted, past the afterimages sharp in her vision, and when she _did_ see, she felt her heart stop. She pulled her hands back sharply from the lever, as if she had been burned; knew for a moment that it was too late, that they couldn’t stop in time; felt the handcar judder and lurch as one wheel separated from its track, and knew with a horrible certainty that they would fall.

It rolled back a foot or so, and fell back into place. Jake moaned and clung tighter to her belt. She could feel his hearbeat, fast and panicked, like a rabbit in a snare.

The Slow Mutants had blocked the track, piling rocks across the rails. It was one of these rocks – thankfully, a small one – that had sent the handcar reeling, but there were more walling off their escape. A shoddy job, the work of sickly hands and poor brains. It would be the work of a moment to clear.

They didn’t have a moment. The horrors were crowding in behind them, hunger in their sunken faces, hollowness in their staring eyes. Soon that hard-won distance would close again. Soon, there would be no way out. Unless…

Jake was looking up at her. In the darkness, she could see glimmers of green reflected in his tears. She prised him away from her, and hardened her jaw.

“Get down.”

He stared at her, his own jaw working under the skin, his lips parted, trying to understand. Or, perhaps, trying not to. “Susan…”

“I can’t shoot and shift rocks.” No more soothing. Her tone now was sharp and certain, as hard as the granite blocking their way. “It has to be you. Get down. I’ll cover you.” Knowing it might be a lie. Knowing she meant it to be true.

Horror was writ large on his face, a slow dawn. He tried to speak, could only manage a low moan. But slowly, with obvious difficulty, he loosened his death-grip on her belt, and then he was moving, moving with the jerky speed of desperation. He jumped down and began to lift the rocks and throw them aside with feverish determination, not looking up, his breath coming in low, sharp sobs.

She bit down on the inside of her cheek, tasting salt, and turned to face the oncoming mutants. Waited. Once, she had been told to wait until she could see the whites of their eyes. Now, seeing those blank black pits they gazed out through, she waited until she saw the whites of their hands, reaching from rubbery arms towards the boy.

“Don’t look,” she heard herself say, absurdly calm. “Head down, Jake. Don’t look.”

The light from her gun was white-hot. She blinked away the pain of it, reloaded, raised the gun again. The rails were almost clear. A mutant went down, hip shattered. Another bullet. The whole world had gone into a sort of slow-motion, the steady ballet of violence. She could hear the roar of blood in her ears. She heard Jake scream.

She didn’t let herself think. Thinking would have slowed her, made her notice the lights dancing in front of her eyes and the smears of motion in her vision. The boy’s head was perhaps two inches from the mutant who had his arm when she fired. It was the mutant that went down.

“Get on.” Her voice wasn’t her own. Nor was the hand she held out, pulling the boy back onto the handcar as she holstered her gun. “Quick.” And some strange old woman’s hands gripped the lever, and some woman who wasn’t her began to move, and then they were past the stones, past the gathering mutants, and still she pushed harder, pushed and pushed until her chest felt it would burst, and the handcar careened down the rails, smashed through the fragile forms of two or three Slow Mutants who had managed to lurch, hands out, to block their passage, and then there was only darkness, and the whistle of the wind, and the burning, frantic pistoning of her arms.

 

**XII**

She didn’t stop for a long time. When at last the adrenaline began to ebb, she stopped very suddenly indeed, collapsed with her weight against the pillar of the handcar and gasped for breath.

At last, then, Jake let go of her belt. He had clung to her, terrified, while they thundered through the darkness - faster, he was sure, than would have been safe even when the tracks were new. Terrified, and trembling, and wondering. When he did let go of her, his legs trembled and gave way at once, and he sat down heavily on the bed of the handcar, his breath coming ragged and heavy.

“I thought you’d leave me,” he said at last. It was dull; the shock left no space for anything else. “I thought… I thought you were going to…” and then he broke, and could say no more than that.

Susan knelt down beside him, and even in the dark, he could tell there were tears in her eyes. They burned against his cheek as she pulled him close, rested her face against his hair.

“I didn’t,” she told him, and her own voice trembled. “I wouldn’t, Jake. Not again. Never again.”

And he clung to her, and she clung to him, and neither of them would ever say it, and both of them knew it was a lie.


	7. Daylight

**I**

They went on in time, and travelled for a long time without incident. The silence grew between them again, neither companionable nor hostile but simply _there_ , growing like lichen in the space between them. There was nothing else, just the silence and the darkness and the steady pumping of the cart’s handle, for three of those lightless, nightless days.

On the fourth day (if it could still be called a day at all), there was a sharp thump beneath them. Jake cried out, and Susan swore, readying her gun, but the handcart carried on smoothly enough after a moment, though pitching leftwards at so steep an angle that both travellers felt themselves leaning right against gravity.

And then, there was light.

It was not much of a light. It was dim and no-colour, without form or substance, so slight that it took several minutes to distinguish from the flashes of colour behind one’s eyelids. But slowly, imperceptibly slowly, the world around them began to form into sight again, hands and bodies and handcart growing edges and faint, unclear shadows. They had been in the dark so long that even this light seemed almost dazzling, and they saw it more than five miles before they reached its source.

“It’s the end,” Jake said, tightly and flatly.

“It isn’t.” Susan’s voice was strangely certain.

It wasn’t. As they pressed on into the light, it resolved itself. Light, but not daylight. This light was colder, artificial, a growing glow that spread around what had become a wide cavern. Gone was the rock wall that had followed them on their left for all those days; in its place, other tracks joined theirs, criss-crossing in a glistening web of rusting steel. Other vehicles sat still and dead on those tracks; handcarts like the one they rode, and passenger coaches, and what looked like a stagecoach adapted to run on those strange, ancient tracks. Susan thought of the Clean Sea, of a walk she and her father had taken when she was very young; of fishing boats beached and half-rotten on a rocky cove under the cliffs. She shuddered, and turned back to the handle of the cart.

Ahead, drawing nearer, was a huge hangar that stretched high above them, vanishing into the dark. Cut into it were yellow squares of light – perhaps two dozen entryways, that grew from points of light to toy windows to huge openings of twenty feet square as they drew closer. The track passed through one of these, and above the entry, the gunslinger saw characters and symbols carved into the stone. Most, she could not read. One, with difficulty, she could. She was not fluent in the High Speech, and let the cart coast slowly to a halt for a few moments so that she could read what the curling letters said.

TRACK 10 TO SURFACE AND…

“…and points west,” Jake murmured beside her, and Susan jumped, looking down at him. He, too, was staring up at the carvings, his pale face bathed in the yellow light from inside the hangar, a look of distant agitation in his eyes. Susan followed his gaze back up, to those vast letters etched deep in ancient rock.

TRACK 10 TO SURFACE AND POINTS WEST.

She might have asked how he could read it. She did not. Either he would be unsure himself, in which case it would only distress him needlessly, or…

She did not ask. She had learned a long time ago that some questions did not need answering.

Clearing her throat, the gunslinger turned back to the lever and began to push again. They rolled on through the opening, into the hangar, and left the darkness behind.

 

**II**

Inside, the light was brighter. The tracks merged and parted again in complex patterns of signals and sidings. Some of the traffic lanterns still worked, flashing forlorn messages in red and amber out to the silent underworld.

The cart passed through high, smooth pillars, caked black with the dust of engines and of age, and then they were past the flashing lights and the monolithic walls, and the hangar opened back out into a kind of central concourse. The handcart coasted to a gentle stop at the edge of a cement platform, and the two of them looked around in the strange, unnatural light.

“It’s like a subway,” Jake said, at last.

“A subway?”

“Never mind. You wouldn’t know what I’m talking about.” He paused, and then added rather sourly, “ _I_ don’t even know what I’m talking about, any more.”

The gunslinger grunted in answer, and moved away from her station at the handle, wiping her aching hands briskly on the worn front of her jeans. They climbed up onto the cracked cement, and stood there for a moment, looking around. The concourse had, some long time ago, been a public place, that much was clear – shops and stalls littered the open space, carts that had once sold coffee and cigarettes, a woman’s fashion store, a bootery… and a weapons shop. With a sudden intake of breath that she could not disguise (and did not try to), the gunslinger saw rifles and revolvers in the window, and felt almost feverish excitement.

On closer inspection, she saw that the barrels had been filled with lead, and there were no shells. She did, however, liberate a creakingly ancient bow and some poorly-weighted arrows, as well as a hunting knife which still seemed to have a decent edge. It was better than nothing.

She was just turning to the clothing store – she had no interest in the clothes themselves, but cloth for bandages and ties rarely went amiss – when she heard the boy cry her name.

He was standing staring at what had once been a book stall. The stall itself was a wonder, lined with dusty, ancient volumes and thin billfolds, but that wasn’t what had caught Jake’s attention or made him call out. Inside the stall, sprawled in the far corner like a workman surprised at his nap, was a corpse. It was long-mummified, wearing a dusty uniform that had nonetheless kept its deep blue colour and its gold braiding intact – some kind of trainman’s uniform, from the look of it. In the mummy’s lap was a newspaper, perfectly preserved and unstirred by the rattling, recirculated air that shivered through most of the concourse. When the gunslinger reached out, curious, and touched it, the paper crumbled into dust under her fingers. When she touched the dead thing’s cheek, it was the same; as the little puff of dust slowly fell away, they could see through the wrinkled, dry flesh to the inside of what had been the man’s mouth. A gold tooth twinkled, calmly unaffected by the centuries.

She withdrew her hand, and looked back over her shoulder at Jake, wordlessly asking what he thought. Wordlessly, he answered, with a little half-shrug and a pulled-down curl of his lips. _Who knows_?

There were other mummies, they found. Perhaps a half-dozen of them lay scattered like forgotten toys around the hangar. The gunslinger began to build some idea in her mind of what had happened – some attack, fallen on this place while there was little traffic (all but two or three of the corpses were dressed in that same blue and gold uniform), and the bodies lying here, undisturbed by weather or wind, for all these centuries. They had not fought. She knew what it looked like when men fell fighting. These men had simply died, where they stood or sat or lay, and rested untouched for lifetimes upon lifetimes.

And nothing had disturbed them, she realised, and suddenly knew what was wrong with this place. Nothing. Not rats, or worms, or even the Slow Mutants that crawled miles back along the tracks. Nothing moved in this place, nothing lingered. Even the air was beginning to stale, the slow clatter of the air circulation system warning of the slow encroachment of entropy.

All of a sudden, Susan Deschain wanted nothing more than to be gone from this place. Straightening up sharply from where she hunkered over one of the mummies, she turned away.

“Best get goin’,” she said shortly, and turned back towards Track 10 and the handcart.

The boy did not follow. He hung back, rebellious and still, and folded his arms. “Not going.”

Susan turned, slowly – very slowly – and looked at him. His face was taut and trembling, his mouth pressed into a sharp line. His anger was almost as palpable as his fear, and his fear was very palpable indeed. Slowly, she raised one eyebrow, an implicit question.

“I’m not going,” he repeated, stubbornly. “You won’t get what you want until I’m dead.”

“Perhaps.” Her voice was quiet, but not unsteady. “Then what will you do, Jake?”

He hesitated. His hands tensed into fists, fingers biting against the pale skin of his arms. “Guess I’ll take my chances alone.”

Her eyes flicked to the blue-clad mummy at their feet, and then back up to his face. For some moments, neither of them spoke, and the silence that had been like lichen began instead to claw like thorns.

“All right,” she said evenly, at last, and turned on her bootheel, not looking back. It was an effort not to look back, one she would not admit to. It struck her that she was being a fool, and again she remembered the face of her son, vanishing into the distance. The look of fury and disgust she saw on Jake’s face was too familiar.

She could turn back, even now, she thought as she vaulted down from the platform and onto the flat bed of the handcart. They could return the way they had come, and linger in the green foothills until the boy was grown. She could forget her dreams, forget the Tower, forget the man in black. Even if they died down there, in the darkness, it might not be so bad. It would only be following the path that her friends had laid for her.

Her hand moved to her hip, touched the smooth sandalwood grip of her gun. Of _Roland’s_ gun. She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes for a moment, and reached for the handle.

“Wait!”

The boy stood at the edge of the platform, thin and panting, his cheeks flushed and his eyes sharp. Susan opened her eyes, looking up at him, and was struck again by the sheer fragility of him – the breakable, fine shape that overlaid such a sturdy heart. There was another choice, still. It would be so easy to simply keep going, leave him to his uncertain fate, let him be forgotten and untouched like the dead things of this place – but still uncertain. Still alive, in her memory.

She did not move.

 “You never finished your story,” he said, quietly. There was some note behind his voice that gave her pause, a weight that reminded her uncomfortably of the sharpness of his intuition.

Susan pressed her lips more tightly together, and looked at him long and hard.

“Are you coming,” she said, at last, “or not?”

The boy heaved a deep breath, as if in resignation, and sat down slowly on the edge of the platform, his pale blue eyes fixed on hers. “Tell me what happened,” he said, and there was a heaviness to his tone. “Tell me what happened at the end, and I’ll go.”

_Go_ , she noted, not _come_. She didn’t remark on it; nor did she say that the end was not yet written and might never be told, although she could have. Instead, she let go of the handle, and slowly, very slowly, sat back on her heels, looking not at him but past him, her weathered brow furrowed.

“There’s not much to tell.” Her voice came out as she had hoped: casual, unmoved. She didn’t flinch. She’d always been good at staring contests. “I fought Cort on the duelling fields. I couldn’t tell you every blow we struck, or give you a tale of every shout and stare. I fought him, and we beat each other bloody, and in the end, I almost killed him, and so I won.”

The boy looked at her for a long time, and it was not his fragility that struck her this time but the sheer probing force behind his eyes, the way his eyes seemed to cut right through her. He did not move, not to join her on the cart, nor to walk away.

“Then what happened?” he said, and to her own surprise, the gunslinger found herself answering.

 

**III**

She almost killed him. It was not easy. Susan was a tall young woman, but Cort was easily twice her size, and once he came at her, he did not hold back. He was quick, even old as he was, even half-blind and lamed; quick, and strong, and brutal.

But Susan Deschain, who had been Susan Delgado, who had dragged herself through almost two decades of loss and poverty and hell – Susan was _angry_.

Many years later, when she sat in the tunnel of an ancient, dead station and told the boy that she couldn’t remember a single blow of that battle, it would not be a lie. It didn’t matter. No single blow ever mattered – not the ones that Cort dealt to her, bloodying her hair and slashing at her gut and shoulder, striking her about the head until her vision swam, and not the ones she dealt in return, either. All that mattered was that she dealt them. Everything else was gone, a distraction: she didn’t see Alain and Cuthbert’s looks of horror, or Marten’s thin smile, or the crowd drawing in around their arena. She didn’t see Cort, or care to. She just _fought_ – struck out with everything she had, struck against the Good Man and his followers, against Hart Thorin whose dead hands she still felt on her body in dark nights, against the men and women who had spat at her and called her slut and witch, against the world that had borne down on her, taken her father, taken her home, taken her love…

When she came to herself, her hands were bloody, and closed around Cort Andrus’ meaty throat. The two of them were both beaten raw, and it took her a time to realise that the red mist that clouded her vision was her own blood, beading on her eyelashes and running in claggy lumps down her cheeks. She looked down at her enemy, and saw blood and spittle bubbling from his lips, his battered, scarred face purpling as she bore down with all her weight, panting.

The sound that came from Cort’s constricted throat was gurgling and hoarse, and it took her several moments to hear the word he was gasping, the breath he was forcing past her choking hands. _Yield. I yield_.

That was when she looked up, and through the sweat and blood and loose fray of hair that covered her face, she saw Patrick’s face. She felt her hands loosen, as though the nerves had been cut, felt herself stumble to her feet and take one step, then two, towards her son.

_For you_ , she tried to say, through lips that were swollen and bloody, through a throat that felt sealed shut. _I only wanted to protect you_. _I only wanted to keep you with me_.

But when she looked down at her enemy, she saw only a beaten old man, and when she looked at her son, she saw the tears and the fear in his eyes as he drew away from her, shrinking back behind Marten’s long black robes. It would be another five years before the final blow was struck, before she would come back from the battlefield to find Patrick gone in that fateful raid, before the last of her world came crumbling down.

It was there on the fields of Gilead, though, looking at her son’s frightened tears and Marten’s thin, lipless smile, that she knew that she had been the one to tear out the foundations.

 

**IV**

“Okay.”

Susan looked up sharply. Her eyes were damp, tears clinging to the crevices that age and weather had dug into her cheeks, and for a moment, she could feel nothing but dull, hollow surprise. “Okay?”

The boy pushed himself down off the platform, jumping onto the handcart. Hunkered down as she was, their eyes were now almost at a level. He looked down at her with something like disgust, and something like pity, and something like rage, and then nodded, just once.

“Okay,” he repeated. He was still pale, and he held himself very stiffly, his face still as the stone pillars that still arched above them. He turned his back on her, and took hold of the cart’s handle, pushing it down with violent suddenness. The cart shot forwards, began to slow. Jake gritted his teeth, and pushed again. “Let’s see where this stupid ride ends.”

 

**V**

The stupid ride led them back into darkness almost at once, the shadows closing around them as they left the station behind them. Driven by some impulse she could not name, the gunslinger let the boy go on driving the cart for some time, while she sat cross-legged behind him, staring into the darkness. The rushing of the river grew louder again, until by the time they stopped to sleep it was a constant roar all around them, echoing and thundering through their dreams.

It was three ‘days’ more before they saw light, and all that time, the river grew louder and closer. The light this time came from the walls of the tunnel itself, which glowed with a sickly phosphorescence and were embedded all through with star-like shapes, the bodies – the boy told the gunslinger gloomily – of some ancient creatures long-dead. _Fotsuls_ , he said. The fotsuls gathered in long clumps along the tracks, casting the way ahead in strange, watery light.

A half-mile or so into this tunnel, the way ahead fell away from them, the glowing rock jutting out in ragged piers, the walls giving way to open darkness. The river was deafening now, roaring far below them, unknowably far. And above that chasm, beyond the dim arch of the tracks as they trailed their way over the darkness, there was a pinprick of light. It was not the dim, greenish glow of the fotsuls, not the unnatural gold of the station – it was blue, and hard, and it was _daylight_.

“Stop,” the boy said. “Stop now. Please.”

The gunslinger did not question it. She lifted her hands away from the handle, and let the cart coast to a juddering stop, the strange, flat shadows of the fotsuls’ light dancing under her hands. Her eyes did not turn to the boy, though, did not move one iota from that pinprick of light. It was a horrible sight, a _final_ sight, and at the same time, a sight that made her heart leap in desperate desire. She had held off the icy grasp of claustrophobia, but now it caught at her spine, until all she wanted was to be out of this endless living grave, to breathe the open air and see the sky, to be human again.

“We’ll go on,” the boy said, and his voice did not shake, but there was a shake _behind_ his voice, a thrumming tension that might snap at any moment. “Is that what he wants? For us to drive the handcart over… over _that_ , and fall?”

“I doubt it.” The gunslinger still did not look at him. She did, however, pull her gaze away from the light, and moved to climb down from the handcar. “We’ll walk, I guess. And if we can’t walk, well…”

Jake’s smile was sickly in the phosphorescent light. “Then we’ll learn to hold still?” It was a joke, of a sort. There was no humour in his tone, though.

Susan did not reply. She moved slowly, carefully, up the track, and heard the boy’s footsteps close behind her. The stone underfoot angled upwards for a while more, until it fell away sharply from underneath the tracks, which continued on alone into the distant blackness. Below, barely visible even to her keen eyes, was an impossible spider-web of steel struts and girders, gleaming like silk and vanishing into the darkness of the crevasse.

How many centuries had it stood, she wondered – how many endless years had passed against this metal maze? She remembered, with a shiver, how the mummy had crumbled to the touch, seemingly solid flesh gone to dust in an instant; saw again the gleam of a gold tooth, and wondered what would be left of that gold if it had been open to time and wear. Below them, the river rushed on, washing its ever-deepening path through the stone, through that trellis of metal on which their passage hung.

She stood, her palms flat on her thighs, and looked up again at the distant pinprick of light.

“We’ll walk now,” she said, and even to her own ears, her voice sounded flat, half-lost to the distant, echoing roar of the river. She had thought that the boy might have to be coaxed, that she might have to lead him like a fractious colt onto the rickety tracks – might even have hoped it, a little, that she would have to go first, a testing weight before his followed. But Jake was already moving onto the welded slats, slow but surefooted, his arms held out at his sides like an acrobat.

Susan hesitated, but only for a split second. Seeing him draw away from her, held so taut and self-assured, made something deep inside her twist and ache.

Not long now. Not long until the end.

The gunslinger swallowed her sorrow, swallowed her guilt, and swallowed the sweet ache of memory – the little girl who had walked with her arms out at her side along the edge of a cut in the earth and pretended she was flying; the little blond boy running surefooted on the battlements of Gilead. She swallowed the ache, and took the first step out over the abyss.

 

**VI**

The trestle they walked on was rotten, very rotten. She felt it shake and groan beneath their weight, swaying faintly with the motion of the far-below river. When she knelt and touched the crossbars they walked on – part of her still crying out to turn back, crying out in her father’s voice – she felt pitted rust flake beneath her fingers. It trembled sickly beneath her weight as she straightened, and though the gunslinger had never been afraid of heights, she felt her stomach drop.

The handcar and the fotsuls had already begun to fade when she looked back over her shoulder. The jutting outcrop of rock on her right fell away after perhaps fifteen yard; that on her left lingered a while longer, and then it too was gone behind them, into the darkness. Then there was only the two of them, the gunslinger and the boy, and the darkness all around them, an infinity of emptiness.

For some time, they walked. Once or twice, the gunslinger felt the steel groan and settle underfoot, ready to give way, but then she was moving on, and there was no sense in looking back. It seemed to her that this was how infinity might feel, this dark and starless emptiness, and the tracks beneath them, fading into invisibility whichever way you looked. The daylight hovered above them, and for a long time, it was sickly constant, as though it withdrew just a little with each step they took, as though it was as infinite as the velvet darkness around them. But little by little, so slowly it was like watching the grass grow, it began to widen and gain definition. They were still far, far below it, but little by little, the tracks were rising to meet the light.

The boy gave a surprised grunt and lurched to the side, his arms pinwheeling. The moment stretched out; it seemed an age before he regained his footing and stepped forwards again, slow and steady. His voice floated back to her, flat and without feeling.

“It almost went on me. There’s a hole. Step over if you don’t want to take a quick trip down.” Then, still in that soft, emotionless tone, “Simon says take one giant step.”

In the gunslinger’s memory, it was _Mother says_ , but she remembered the game well enough that for a moment she heard laughter, smelled the sweet-sharp of fresh grass on the Drop. It passed as soon as it had come, and once again there was only the darkness. Wordlessly, she stepped over the crosstie that Jake had stepped on, hanging at a crazy angle from a rotten rivet.

“Go back,” he said, unsmiling. “You forgot to say _may I?_ ”

Unamused, the gunslinger only grunted, and gestured him on.

Upwards the track turned, ever upwards, and time and space seemed to lose all meaning. There was only the slow, careful tread of foot before foot, and the darkness around them, and the light above them still pinning them to this world. Every moment stretched to an eternity, and the gunslinger’s treacherous mind insisted on turning to futures that never were, to the fall of each crosstie that held steady or groaning beneath her. To how it would feel to fall; that sick tottering, the way the steel would scream and twist beneath her, the scrabble of bootheels and fingers for purchase that wasn’t there… It seemed that they hung in infinity, and so perhaps there was an infinity of falling beneath them, of tumbling heel over head and head over heels in the velvet blackness. She could imagine all too well how it would be, that sucking emptiness of the canyon, the wind rushing faster and faster around her, pulling back eyelids and lips and hair, snatching at skin and clothes, tearing the scream from her lips to trail like a streamer above her and fade into the dark…

Metal _did_ scream beneath her then. She moved on unhurriedly, at the crucial moment not thinking of the fall, but trusting to her instinct to carry her forwards as it had done for so long. Not thinking of how far they might have come, or how far was left. Not thinking of how near the end was now, or what a wretched relief that end might be.

“Three ties out,” the boy said, from ahead. His voice was still cool, steady. “I’m gonna jump. Here. Right here.” She saw him move, saw how he hunched and readied himself, heard him cry _Geronimo!_ – and then he was suspended, an awkward, flailing spreadeagle, arms out as though in the moment of falling he might fly, suspended for an eternity in that awful, endless nothing.

When he landed, the whole track juddered and swayed drunkenly at the impact. Far, far below them, metal protested and screeched and fell. The splash was almost lost in the roar of the river.

“Are you over?” the gunslinger asked, when the last echoes had died away.

“Yes.” The boy’s voice was still calm, but something had changed in it, some tension tightening on his tone like a garrotting wire. “But it’s very rotten. Like the ideas of some people, maybe. It’ll hold me, but not you. Not any further than you are now. Go back.” That tension was no longer merely tightening; it _thrummed_ , like the trestle beneath her feet. “Go back now, and leave me alone.”

The gunslinger’s legs were long, and her balance had always been good. One step took her over. One giant step.

“Go back.” The boy’s voice shook now. The _boy_ shook, shuddering helplessly. She could smell the salt tang of his fear. “Please. I don’t want you to kill me.”

“Then stay where you are,” she said gruffly, “and you’ll kill us both before there’s the chance. Or walk, and we’ll see what comes.”

He opened his mouth, a deeper darkness in the formless shadows around them, and then closed it and turned away. The dim light shivered on his tears. He walked without that surety now, his hands spread in front of him like a drunk as he shuffled blindly along the tracks, his breath coming short and sharp.

They walked.

It was more rotten now, more rotten with every step. The fresh breeze which brushed the gunslinger’s face, making her long desperately for wind and sky, had worked its fingers treacherously into the steel beneath them; damp and open air, the friends of corruption, had long eaten into the trestle. There were frequent breaks of one, two, even three cross-ties; gap-toothed aching chasms that seemed to beckon to the darkness below. The gunslinger waited, dreading, for the longer space that would open up before them and force them to walk directly on the juddering, rust-pocked rails.

She kept her eyes on the daylight. It had a colour now, the blue of a spring morning, and as they walked the darkness around them softened and eased, losing some of that velvet infinity. Fifty yards now, or a hundred? She couldn’t tell. What she could tell was that as they grew closer, the light was ceasing to be merely a light, and becoming a hole, an _exit_. Forty yards now, no more than that. Thirty. The track ahead was visible now, its ties sagging and broken, its gap-toothed smile a challenge - but a challenge, now, that no longer seemed impossible. Perhaps, after all, it could be done. Perhaps in the sunlight, these evil premonitions would wither and fade like the sense of endlessness that had surrounded her; perhaps they might yet find themselves standing together, blinking, under the sky.

The daylight was blocked out. A dark silhouette covered the sun, cast them back into the blackness. Only a few chinks of mocking blue filtered past arms, legs, the outline of shoulders and the fork of crotch.

“Heya, kids!” The man in black’s voice echoed down to them, the stone of the cavern his accomplice, throwing back his voice from every angle and amplifying the cheery sarcasm of his goodwill.

Susan’s teeth clenched, and she blindly sought the jawbone in her pocket – but it was gone, lost somewhere, used up. Above them, too far above them, the man laughed. It echoed back again and again, crashing in on them like thunder, a high titter that turned the blood to ice.

The boy screamed, and recoiled. For an endless moment he hung there, tottering at the edge, his arms once again wheeling but this time bringing him no balance. With vicious, dreamlike slowness, the metal began to twist and judder, adding its screams to his, ripping like skin under a blade.

Jake fell. It happened slowly, and then all at once, as the dream passed and time began again; he plunged pale and shrieking down to that infinity, and then his hand came up, a flash of white in the darkness, and caught a purchase. He hung there, dangling over the emptiness, and his blue eyes looked up in final, blind knowledge.

“Help me.”

Above, tittering, echoing, that other voice: “No more games, gunslinger. Come now, or catch me never.”

Chips on the table, and the end in sight. Every card drawn now but one, and the boy hung like a living Tarot card, the Hanged Man above the Stygian blackness, the infant perched at the edge of birth.

_Hold still, Sue. Hold still._

“Help me. Help me, Susan.”

_His voice is so loud, how can I think?_

“Do I stay, gunslinger, or go?”

_He looked at me with his father’s eyes_.

The eyes looking up at her now were not Roland Deschain’s eyes. They were too dark, too deep, too terrified. The trestle screamed again, like a beast in pain, and began to separate, to tear. A hand reached out to her, groped desperately at darkness so deep it was like the fall of a cloak.

“Then I shall leave you,” said the man in black, above, and turned to go.

“ _NO!_ ” she roared, and then her paralysis was broken and she was leaping, scrambling, taking a true giant’s step upwards towards her quarry, landing in a skidding, giddying rush towards the light that offered the Tower, offered _answers_ , offered the trembling beginnings of an end to her long and endless search.

Silence.

The silhouette was gone, as if it had never been. Bright blue sunlight gazed down at her accusingly, the colour of her child’s eyes. For a moment, she stopped; held herself there with one hand on the ledge at the beginnings of the daylight, stretching back with the other to where, too far below, the trestle creaked and settled, slowly, beginning to fall.

The boy who was not Patrick looked up, and the sunlight fell for a moment on his face, on the dreadful loosening of his pale fingers.

“Go, then. There are other worlds than these.”

He did not cry out. The darkness took him in silence, wrapped him in its velvet robes as the whole great weight of the trestle ripped away and plummeted with him. He did not scream, but his eyes were heavier than the steel that thundered after him.

Susan watched him fall, watched until there was nothing but blackness, and watched a moment still after that. And then she turned away, and was surprised to find that her eyes were dry, her legs steady as she pulled herself up the little scree of stone and into the daylight.

The man in black stood spread-legged and cross-armed with his back to her, down the rocky escarpment towards the grassy plain that spread out below. The gunslinger stood slowly, pallid and made ghostly by the dust of her final desperate lunge; she turned one last time, and saw the darkness behind her, a simple thing, a past thing. Somewhere down in that darkness, she knew with a detached certainty, the last of her heart still fell, and was caught at last by the crash of water and steel.

She had ghosts a-plenty. They had trailed on her heels all her life, a whisper of memory and of guilt. There was no reason that the boy who had not been Patrick should be any more than that; a thing saved for dark nights and heavy fevers, and otherwise put aside until there was time for luxuries to once more become necessities, for guilt and love and grief to flow back in.

Somehow, though, she knew that this was different. The boy’s face lingered, and would linger; the dark holes of his eyes and his mouth as he looked up at her; that betrayal and that total, utter lack of surprise. That face would stay with her all the days of her life, follow her step for step. She would try to outrun it, try to outlast it, perhaps try to drown it in whisky and blood, and still when the end came, whenever the end came, she would see him imprinted on the insides of her eyelids, breathe out her last breath in a cry of twisting steel and rushing wind.

Her eyes were still dry. The wind caught her hair, twisted it playfully. She began to walk, slowly, unsteadily, towards the man in black.

He laughed to see her, laughed like a child as he pushed back his hood and turned to look at her. His face had not changed since the field of Gilead, all those years ago. Darkness twisted behind his eyes, or perhaps behind her own, and still he laughed.

“So, not an end, but an end of the beginning!” he cried, and the delight trickled like ice through his voice. “You progress, girl! You progress, gunslinger! Oh, how I admire you!”

She drew with a speed even she had not known she possessed, and fired twelve times. The gunflashes outdazzled the sun, and the thunder of her pistols roared back from the stone slopes around them. Dust and smoke filled the air, and lingered for a time with the reek of cordite.

When the smoke cleared, he was still smiling that gentle, fatherly smile. “Now-now,” he murmured, and _tsk_ ed, clicking his tongue against his too-thin lips. “Oh, now-now- _now_ , little Sue. You no more kill me than you kill yourself.”

The shells burnt her fingertips as she reloaded. She raised the guns as he smiled at her, as he stepped back slowly, beckoning, inviting. “Come,” he said, as a father might to his errant child, then as a brother to a sister, as a lover to another. “Come. Come. Come. Mother, may I? Yes-you-may.”

The gunslinger did not shoot. She did not lower her guns. With her jaw clenched tight and her back held taut, she followed him step-by-step, word-by-word; followed him in broken boots to the place of counselling.


End file.
